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Episode: RFK Jr. and The Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement

Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:14:30

Episode Shownotes

A political candidate has some questions and we have some extremely obvious answers.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastLinks!Eric Garcia’s “We’re Not Broken”Mike and Sarah’s episode on autism and the anti-vaxx movementSeth Mnookin’s “The Panic Virus”Jonathan M.

Berman’s “Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement” Brian Deer’s “The Doctor Who Fooled the World”Paul Offit’s “Autism's False Prophets”Steve Silberman’s “Neurotribes”Peter Hotez’s “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science”Behind The Bastards episode on smallpox anti-vaxxers RFK Jr.’s Inside JobThe Conspiracy CandidateDavid Pitts's "Jack and Lem”RFK Jr.’s autobiographyImmunizations and Autism: A Review of the LiteratureWakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulentCorrecting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine ‘facts’Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
My throat is so sore Aubrey. I've been talking for three and a half hours.

00:00:02 Speaker_03
You've been talking a lot?

00:00:03 Speaker_02
I've been talking a lot. I got very animated. I got very animated.

00:00:08 Speaker_03
I like your weird ASMR voice. Your little Kathleen Turner voice.

00:00:12 Speaker_02
I'm just eating some pickles.

00:00:26 Speaker_03
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's finally wading into Nepo Baby discourse. Oh, with the ultimate Nepo Baby. A solid two years after it's relevant.

00:00:40 Speaker_02
Which is actually pretty short for us.

00:00:42 Speaker_03
I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase.

00:00:49 Speaker_03
You can get t-shirts, totes, mugs, all kinds of things at TeePublic and you can subscribe through Apple podcasts and get the same audio as our Patreon feed.

00:01:01 Speaker_02
You can totes do that. No. Okay. How did it take me three years to come up with that? That's, that's absurd.

00:01:06 Speaker_03
Today we are talking about a conspiracy theorist about whom I actually know very little. Oh, okay. I was going to ask you about this. I sort of have a broad sense of RFK Jr. I know that his late beloved father was Bobby Kennedy. Yes.

00:01:24 Speaker_03
Uh, that his uncle was JFK, the president. All I sort of generally know is like anti-vax question mark.

00:01:33 Speaker_02
Yeah. It's more like anti-vax interrobang.

00:01:36 Speaker_05
with like very emphatically an anti-vax episode.

00:01:40 Speaker_02
I mean, this is kind of why I wanted to do this. So like, like you, I, I didn't really know anything about this guy and he's, he's essentially found a loophole.

00:01:50 Speaker_02
He has over the years been kicked off of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, everywhere because of his anti-vax bullshit. So he really can't get an audience.

00:01:59 Speaker_02
But then there's this thing where if you run for president, everyone has to like pay attention to you. He's Connor Roy. Yeah. Looking for the con heads. Only less likable. And yes, I was not expecting to do an episode on this man.

00:02:14 Speaker_02
But then due to my personality, I listened to the entire Joe Rogan episode with him, which is fucking three hours long. Because he's an anti-vaxxer. It also struck me that like we haven't really covered anti-vaxxers. Yeah.

00:02:30 Speaker_02
And it felt like, okay, let's do it. I don't find this guy all that interesting.

00:02:34 Speaker_02
But he's an entry point into, like, how did the anti-vax movement get to the place where we now have a scion of this political dynasty and presidential candidate just openly expressing anti-vax nonsense?

00:02:49 Speaker_03
Really giving the listeners the hard sell. Not very interesting.

00:02:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, I know. I'm going to tell you over and over again that this man is boring. You're in for whatever the opposite of a treat is. So we will be going into

00:03:03 Speaker_02
more of his biography and sort of how he intersects with this, the rise of the anti-vax movement in the 1990s. I want to start, though, by just establishing the fact that this dude is cuckoo bananas.

00:03:19 Speaker_02
So he thinks that the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle. He thinks that the wrong person was convicted of killing his father. He says that mass shootings are caused by, like, everybody being on antidepressants.

00:03:35 Speaker_02
So he says, prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events. What?

00:03:41 Speaker_02
We also have a lot more mass shootings since, like, the introduction of Blu-ray DVDs, and, like, the Toyota Prius, and, like, we have a lot more mass shootings since many things happened.

00:03:52 Speaker_03
Presumably we also have health records for mass shooters and some awareness of like not 100% of them were on Prozac at the time.

00:04:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. In fact, one of the main problems is that they weren't medicated for many people. So it's not, it just doesn't make any sense. He also, he's obviously a lab leak guy. Lab leak stuff is absolutely your kink.

00:04:15 Speaker_02
I finally, I finally get to talk about the lab leak. What's funny about the lab leak discourse is that I feel like most people do not know what they're actually proposing because nobody gives a shit about the actual facts of the case. So in RFK Jr.

00:04:28 Speaker_02
's book, he says, Anthony Fauci partnered with the Pentagon to approve taxpayer-funded gain-of-function experiments to breed pandemic superbugs in poorly regulated labs in Wuhan, China and elsewhere under conditions that almost certainly guaranteed the escape

00:04:46 Speaker_02
of weaponized microbes like SARS-CoV-2. What the fuck are you talking about? And it's, it's my favorite shit because he's not just saying that like China designed a super bug in a lab, which is like the far right conspiracy version of it.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
He's saying the US funded China to create a super weapon.

00:05:06 Speaker_03
This is just someone who like got high and watched the Oppenheimer trailer and was like, I know what's really going on.

00:05:16 Speaker_02
He's also, I mean, I don't even need to tell you this at this point, but he's an ivermectin guy. He's a hydroxychloroquine guy. He's a fucking vitamin D truther, which we will get into in great detail. This is my favorite.

00:05:28 Speaker_03
Wait, I don't know what that means to be a vitamin D truther.

00:05:31 Speaker_02
Oh, Aubrey, you're going to learn. You're going to learn so much.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Okay, okay, okay. I'm not Googling. I'm not Googling. It's gonna be fine. I'm not Googling.

00:05:37 Speaker_02
He also thinks that chemicals in the water are the reason for, like, transgender people.

00:05:44 Speaker_03
Oh my god, is this, I don't want them putting it in the water and turning the frogs gay? Are we getting into Alex Jones territory?

00:05:50 Speaker_02
It's literally the same study. Wow. There, like, is a study about frogs, like, growing ovaries or something. It's not clear that it's chemical. Like, obviously they've taken this and, like, really ran with it far beyond the facts. Yeah.

00:06:05 Speaker_02
He also wrote a book, which, for the love of fucking God, I read because it's very short and is mostly footnotes, but, like, janky footnotes, called... Do you know what his book is called? No.

00:06:17 Speaker_02
As soon as I saw it, I was like, I have to read this for the show. It's called The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Oh, wow. It's like, put fucking everything in there, man.

00:06:32 Speaker_03
Based on that title, I'm guessing he's also a, like, Soros truther guy.

00:06:37 Speaker_02
He weirdly doesn't, because I actually Ctrl-F'd for Soros and the person didn't fund it. So I was like, here it comes. He's a Soros guy. Somehow, for some reason, that's where he draws the line.

00:06:47 Speaker_02
The book has blurbs from, listen to this cursed fucking list of public figures. Tucker Carlson, Tony Robbins, the self-help guy, Alan Dershowitz. Joseph Mercola, future subject of a maintenance phase episode of Joseph Mercola.

00:07:02 Speaker_03
Yeah, absolutely no question.

00:07:04 Speaker_02
Rob Schneider, who the comedian is now like a super duper far right guy. And obviously Oliver Stone and Naomi Wolf.

00:07:12 Speaker_03
Just like absolute cuckoo bird.

00:07:15 Speaker_02
People who just like have no credibility whatsoever in like whatever field they're in. Like Rob Schneider is not a well respected actor. Sure he is. He's making copies.

00:07:26 Speaker_03
Come on.

00:07:28 Speaker_02
Now we're back to our comfort zone, 90s references, 30 year old references.

00:07:32 Speaker_03
30 year old SNL sketches. Yeah.

00:07:35 Speaker_02
We need like a lyrics genius page for this fucking podcast. All the zoomers will be like, what the fuck is that a reference to?

00:07:40 Speaker_03
Start that wiki. Yeah.

00:07:43 Speaker_02
He also, okay, we need to, we badly need to do an episode on this, but he also is an HIV truther. Are you aware of this?

00:07:50 Speaker_03
Oh no, Michael. Here's what I know. I know that there are people who think that HIV is a sham. Yes. And I also know that there are people who think that HIV can be cured by a macrobiotic diet. Yeah.

00:08:06 Speaker_03
And I could see either one of those coming into play here.

00:08:09 Speaker_02
This basically was taken up by the president of South Africa for many years, and he wouldn't import antiretrovirals into the country, which cost many tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives, potentially.

00:08:21 Speaker_02
So it's a really, really consequential, horrible conspiracy theory. But the conspiracy theory is so fucking stupid, Aubrey, that it's almost hard to talk about. that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. What? It's like someone saying like the sky is green.

00:08:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally.

00:08:35 Speaker_02
You're just like, no, it's not.

00:08:37 Speaker_03
It also makes me uncomfortable because so many of the arguments around anti-fatness, around like wellness stuff, any conclusions that allow us to reinforce our existing biases, when we're asked to prove why those conclusions are true, we often go, that's just how it is, right?

00:08:57 Speaker_03
Oh, totally. Because it absolutely doesn't have to be that way. But in this case, I'm like, No, that's just how it fucking is. God, what?

00:09:02 Speaker_02
So OK, we are going to watch a clip with his wildest conspiracy theory. This is from the Joe Rogan podcast.

00:09:12 Speaker_00
Wi-Fi radiation. does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.

00:09:18 Speaker_02
Wi-Fi.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer. Yeah, from your cell phone. I mean, there's cell phone tumors.

00:09:22 Speaker_02
Cell phones.

00:09:23 Speaker_00
You know that? I mean, I'm representing hundreds of people who have cell phone tumors behind the ear. It's always on the ear that you favor with your cell phone. But cancer's not the worst thing.

00:09:33 Speaker_00
They also, you know, it opens up, Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier. And so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain. How does Wi-Fi radiation open up your blood-brain barrier?

00:09:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, now you've gone beyond my expertise. I'm going to use a number here, and you're going to think it's hyperbole, but it's not. There are tens of thousands of studies that show the horrendous danger of Wi-Fi radiation.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
Russians know more about Wi-Fi radiation than anybody. They developed it as a weapon, and a lot of the really good science came out of Russia. The Russians won't let kids use cell phones in kindergarten or in grade school.

00:10:18 Speaker_00
A lot of the schools in Russia don't let cell phones in there because of the danger.

00:10:23 Speaker_02
You learn so much in that clip, Aubrey. It's dense with information.

00:10:26 Speaker_03
It's densely packed. I learned that there are literally tens of thousands of studies on any one topic.

00:10:33 Speaker_02
You also learned that the Russians invented Wi-Fi radiation, famously.

00:10:37 Speaker_03
And they don't let kids use cell phones in kindergarten, which apparently, I guess, we're doing in classrooms in the U.S. What?

00:10:45 Speaker_02
That's why the kids are trans, because of the frogs and the cell phones. Also CRT. My favorite little interaction is when he's like, did you know it opens up the blood brain barrier?

00:10:54 Speaker_02
And Joe Rogan, famously skeptical journalist, Joe Rogan is like, how does it open up the blood brain barrier? And he's like, that's beyond my expertise.

00:11:03 Speaker_03
So Early on when you and I first sort of started talking and hanging out, you were talking about like the best follow-up question you can ask as an interviewer is just like, say more about that.

00:11:16 Speaker_02
Yeah. How so?

00:11:16 Speaker_03
Or like explain. Yeah. And that is exactly what Joe Rogan did is just like, ask the next clarifying question that's sitting in front of him and just immediate stumper.

00:11:28 Speaker_02
Sorry, could you say a little bit more about that? And then he just immediately fucking punts. Yeah. Blood-brain barrier. Normal. So then another thing that you might notice about this clip is that his voice sounds a little bit weird.

00:11:40 Speaker_02
So in his 40s, he developed a condition called spasmodic dysphonia. There is a very interesting and telling excerpt from a very good NBC News article about him, which I am going to send to you.

00:11:58 Speaker_03
Quote, his voice is gravely and strained.

00:12:01 Speaker_03
It's gotten progressively worse since the 90s when Kennedy was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes his larynx to tighten uncontrollably and his voice to halt and tremor.

00:12:15 Speaker_03
The cause of spasmodic dysphonia isn't known. Researchers think it might be genetic or a leftover disability from a respiratory infection or even stress. Kennedy, though, suspects a flu vaccine may be to blame.

00:12:30 Speaker_03
Quote, I haven't been able to figure out any other cause, he told a podcaster in 2021. In a follow-up email, Kennedy said he wasn't sure of the connection, calling it, quote, my own speculation.

00:12:42 Speaker_03
His press person sent links to fact sheets included in manufacturer packaging of more recent flu vaccines that list dysphonia among dozens of reported, quote-unquote, adverse reactions.

00:12:55 Speaker_03
The adverse reactions in those package inserts, which are legal, not medical documents, are based on unverified observations and, as they make clear, don't suggest the vaccine necessarily caused the reaction.

00:13:09 Speaker_03
Yeah, this is like lawyer, don't get us sued paper that gets put in.

00:13:14 Speaker_02
This is a pattern that we will see throughout this episode where it's like he makes this wildly overblown claim. I got this from the flu vaccine. And then someone is like, sorry, can you support this at all? And he's like, yes, yes, of course.

00:13:28 Speaker_02
And then he sends a bunch of fucking gibberish.

00:13:30 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
And then when you press him more, he's like, oh, well, I never really said it was vaccine. I'm just speculating. Michael, I just looked in the sidebar next to this clip that we just watched.

00:13:39 Speaker_02
My algorithm fully thinks I'm Jenny McCarthy, like, quote unquote, doing my own research.

00:13:44 Speaker_03
No, the one that really got me, I was like, woof, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Club Random with Bill Maher. Yeah, I know.

00:13:54 Speaker_02
I watched that one too.

00:13:55 Speaker_03
Oh God, buddy. Why is this happening to me?

00:13:57 Speaker_02
Although, I also learned researching this episode that Spotify allows you to play podcasts at up to 3.5x speed. which bless, bless Spotify. Fucking YouTube 2X is not fast enough for me. My brain is so broken by watching these fucking clips.

00:14:14 Speaker_02
I'm like, speed it up, man.

00:14:16 Speaker_03
Get me to the gay frogs. Yeah. So this like stipulated, this dude is a full cuckoo bird.

00:14:23 Speaker_02
Yeah. So thank you. That was the reason for all that. Thank you for pulling me back to my notes. That this is the whole reason for that little section. So there's a couple of factors in his life.

00:14:31 Speaker_02
that led him to become the conspiracy theorist that he is today. The first are his personal circumstances, like just everything that happened to him growing up. So this is from a very good Rebecca Traister article about him.

00:14:45 Speaker_02
Oh, I like Rebecca Traister. I know, right? She's good. She's good. She says, if he were your uncle, you would likely consider that he is fighting some serious psychological headwinds. His own uncle was assassinated when Bobby was nine.

00:14:57 Speaker_02
He was pulled from school at 14 and flown to the deathbed of his father, also assassinated. His cousin drove a plane into the sea on the way to Bobby's sister's wedding. One brother died in a skiing accident, another of a drug overdose.

00:15:09 Speaker_02
His wife died by suicide. All this in a family in which his grandfather's dictum was, there will be no crying in this house. When his father was killed, his mother was pregnant with her 11th child? They had always had a tumultuous relationship.

00:15:24 Speaker_02
He talks in his autobiography about begging to be sent off to boarding school, just like to get out of the house because they were fighting so much. And after RFK Sr.

00:15:35 Speaker_02
is killed, it seems like his mom just kind of like gave up and like foisted him off onto the rest of the family, onto family friends. It's this really interesting upbringing where he's kind of like raised by a village.

00:15:49 Speaker_02
He also talks in his autobiography about starting drugs very young. He is later diagnosed with ADHD, so he's kind of self-medicating. It starts with like weed and alcohol and then it graduates to coke and LSD and eventually heroin.

00:16:07 Speaker_02
He is eventually arrested for possession in 1983 in South Dakota. He continues to attend AA meetings to this day. It's something he talks about, like, fairly movingly, honestly. Being in recovery is still, like, a really big part of his life.

00:16:23 Speaker_03
Addiction makes sense as a reasonable coping mechanism to deal with all of this. Oh, yeah. You are losing both of your parents in some fashion.

00:16:32 Speaker_02
Exactly. And so the other way that he comes to these conspiratorial views, and I think this is actually very important, is that, like, he starts from, like, genuinely being correct.

00:16:43 Speaker_02
So in the 1980s, after he is arrested for heroin possession, he has to do 800 hours of community service.

00:16:49 Speaker_02
He is scooped up by this guy who works for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is like a legal clinic that basically sues governments for polluting the environment.

00:17:00 Speaker_02
He starts working at this organization and eventually rises up through the ranks. He is one of the people generally credited with cleaning up the Hudson River. This becomes a big deal in his life. He's a big nature enthusiast.

00:17:12 Speaker_02
He starts doing falconry when he's a little kid, which is such a rich people habit. But whatever, it's a nature thing. He loves being outside, fishing, hunting, all this kind of stuff.

00:17:20 Speaker_03
Sure.

00:17:21 Speaker_02
Falconry, dressage. Hunting poor people for sport. He's really on the side of justice. He's a big climate change guy.

00:17:30 Speaker_02
The earliest interviews you can find of him on the internet are him talking about the fossil fuel industry and how they've captured the EPA. A lot of this stuff is fucking true.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
I think that kind of crusader personality type combined with all of the other stuff that he's been through just makes him more susceptible. to, to this kind of, you know, anti-establishment, everything is a conspiracy type of thinking.

00:17:56 Speaker_03
That makes sense to me. And also it sounds like this is not a story of someone who is revealing themselves to be a cuckoo bird, right? This isn't like a Scooby-Doo villain peeling off their mask and being like, hi, it was me all along.

00:18:13 Speaker_03
This sounds like a case of genuine, like an unstable core sort of issue. This is a guy who has not had a steady environment.

00:18:21 Speaker_03
and has not had relationships that stick around regardless and has not, you know what I mean, like has just like had a tough row to hoe.

00:18:28 Speaker_02
And also there's various reports from friends, some of which are sort of rumors, so I don't know how seriously to take this, but people say that he's always been kind of insecure about his intellect and insecure about being like one of the lesser Kennedys.

00:18:42 Speaker_02
The shadow that his father casts is so large. And I think he's always been aware of like the need to live up to that. and a little bit insecure about his ability to do so.

00:18:52 Speaker_02
And I also understand why that would give you a little bit of a chip on your shoulder when people are criticizing you or saying, like, I don't know about the science on that. You're like, oh, are you saying I'm not good enough?

00:19:02 Speaker_02
Not that I'm expressing a huge amount of sympathy with nepo babies, but there is the thing of you're kind of aware of the fact. that you've gotten this push into these upper echelons. And I think there's like an insecurity that comes along with that.

00:19:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:18 Speaker_03
I mean, I think like if you think about sort of like what are the life choices for someone with like very notable or exceptional or well-known parents,

00:19:29 Speaker_03
Their options are go into that same line of work as your parents and get compared to them for forever.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
Go into a different line of work that's like a little bit more normie and have people roll their eyes at you doing some kind of tourism or not really having the same experience as everyone else. what have you.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
So I'm just like, I do actually have empathy for that. That seems like a tough position to be in.

00:19:54 Speaker_03
And it makes sense that people would act out in weird ways if it feels like all of their choices are going to be that heavily judged based on someone else's actions.

00:20:03 Speaker_02
I'm like, I get that. I had a thing a couple years ago where my dad asked me to make him a mixtape. I put a bunch of Amy Winehouse songs on there because I thought my dad would like her. And my dad was like, this woman has this beautiful voice.

00:20:15 Speaker_02
What's her story? He had never heard of her. I told him her struggles with addiction and how her life ended and everything else.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
And my dad, who's the kindest guy, he's like, Mike, I'm so glad you never had any big talents because it makes it so hard when you're really talented. I'm like, dad, there's probably another way you could have said that. I know what you mean.

00:20:38 Speaker_02
Let's let's workshop the phrasing of that dad famously talentless Michael Hobbs As a member of the mediocre white guy community, I am glad for my lack of privilege You were not a tag kid.

00:20:50 Speaker_03
I would assume you were a tag kid.

00:20:51 Speaker_02
Oh, is that like a pro? We didn't have that Oh talented and gifted. Oh, no, I was not I was and am neither just ask my dad. When I was reading about RFK Jr.

00:21:05 Speaker_02
and about like the rise of the anti-vax movement, I was like, okay, we can do a whole episode just dunking on this guy. And like, this is what he says that's wrong. That's what he says is wrong. That's not gonna be very interesting for us.

00:21:13 Speaker_02
It's not gonna be very interesting for other people. And so I want to talk about the tactics of conspiracy theorists. and how to recognize conspiracy thinking structurally.

00:21:27 Speaker_02
So the first thing that conspiracy theorists do, and I think it's very important to start with this, is that they fucking lie. So I'm sending you another clip.

00:21:39 Speaker_02
From now on, I'm speeding up the clips slightly, just because I had to watch so many hours of this man, and I feel like the least I can do is speed through the clips that we have. So this is at one and a half speed.

00:21:54 Speaker_00
I think most people don't know what my stance is on vaccines. I've never been anti-vaccine. Using that pejorative to describe me is a way of silencing or marginalizing me.

00:22:01 Speaker_00
Virtually every American would agree with my stance on vaccines, which is that vaccines should be tested like other medicines. They should be safety tested. And unfortunately, the vaccines are not safety tested.

00:22:13 Speaker_00
Of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated, essentially mandated, I recommend it, but they're really mandated, American children, none of them, not one, has ever been subject to a pre-licensing placebo-controlled trial.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
Yes, they have. No.

00:22:28 Speaker_00
Yes, they have. Okay, let me just say something. Dr. Fauci and many other people for many years said this, yet Bobby Kennedy, when he says that, is wrong.

00:22:36 Speaker_00
So I met with Dr. Fauci in 2016, you know, and I agreed to go on Trump's Vaccine Safety Commission, and I was with Aaron Seery and Lynn Redwood and a number of other people, and we said to him, can you show us one test from any vaccine, pre-licensing safety tests?

00:22:50 Speaker_00
And he said, I'll send it to you. I can't find one now. He never did. So we sued him.

00:22:56 Speaker_00
Aaron Ziering and I sued HHS, and after a year of litigation and stonewalling, they said that they could not provide a single safety study for any vaccine that is on the childhood schedule, pre-licensing safety study.

00:23:09 Speaker_00
So anybody who wants to read that can go to the Children's Health Defense website and you can read HHS's admission that not a single one has ever been safety tested pre-licensing.

00:23:21 Speaker_02
Boy oh boy. I just think we should safety test the vaccines.

00:23:24 Speaker_03
It's really amazing as we're going through all of this how much the sort of style of talking here reminds me of watching so much of the Montana State Legislature this year. Oh really?

00:23:36 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's like, there was a guy who sponsored their drag ban, and his whole thing was like, just Google it. They're sexualizing our children. Just Google it.

00:23:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, here's a 200 page PDF that you can read that may or may not confirm my views. But like, we all know you're not going to fucking do that.

00:23:55 Speaker_03
Right, either it does confirm my views and it's from a totally uncredited source slash I just personally wrote it, or it's not going to confirm my views and I'm just counting on you not reading it to not know that it counters my views.

00:24:10 Speaker_02
And also this thing of like, I talked to Dr. Fauci and he never got back to me. Does that actually mean anything significantly? Like there's probably many people that Fauci talks to and doesn't email back.

00:24:20 Speaker_03
I called Beyonce and she never called me back.

00:24:25 Speaker_02
If you watch a lot of interviews with him, you find that he just plays the same tapes over and over again. So this is like a spiel that he goes on almost word for word the same.

00:24:32 Speaker_02
The claim is that the vaccines that we have now have not been tested against placebos. So I started looking into the history of the anti-vax movement. And what you find is that the minute that we had vaccines, we had anti-vaxxers.

00:24:50 Speaker_02
So the first vaccine for smallpox is invented or like they're sort of testing out early versions of it in 1721. And the doctor who's working on this in Boston has to stop the work because he's getting so many threats. Wow, what?

00:25:08 Speaker_02
We eventually in the 1800s get like good vaccines for smallpox because this guy Edward Jenner has the extremely disgusting idea of injecting people with pus from sores of milkmaids that had cowpox.

00:25:25 Speaker_02
You know, it's like this milder form of smallpox, but he's like, why aren't the milkmaids getting smallpox? That's weird. It's because they got this cowpox thing, which is like not that bad, but also provides inoculation.

00:25:36 Speaker_02
To be fair to the early anti-vaxxers, vaccines were fucking disgusting.

00:25:39 Speaker_03
Yeah, I was going to say content note for pus injections, I guess.

00:25:43 Speaker_02
You have no idea the stuff that I had to read and watch for this. It's so fucking gross. But anyway, the first vaccine mandate in the United States was in 1853 and there's a huge anti-vax movement.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
There's a very good Behind the Bastards podcast on this. There's a book called Pox about this. And then I also read a book called Anti-Vaxxers, How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan Berman. Terrible title, very good book. Oh, good.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
So he talks about the earliest, like the first anti-vaxxers in the United States. Actually, this is long. Why don't I send it to you?

00:26:20 Speaker_03
Great. Much of the prevalent anti-vaccine sentiment of the era was laid out in 1854 when John Gibbs published the booklet Our Medical Liberties or The Personal Rights of the Subject as Infringed by Recent and Proposed Legislation.

00:26:36 Speaker_03
compromising observations on the Compulsory Vaccination Act, the medical registration and reform bills, and the Maine laws. End of title.

00:26:47 Speaker_03
Gibbs attacked the Vaccination Act of 1853 on several fronts, complaining that it was an intrusion on personal rights,

00:26:54 Speaker_03
that it was written to benefit the medical trade, that it treated the populace as too stupid to make their own health decisions, that it mandated a practice that was not universally accepted among physicians, and that it had failed in some individual cases.

00:27:09 Speaker_02
I want to point out here, the arguments of anti-vaxxers have not changed for 170 years. This is exactly what we have now, right? What about my rights? It's benefiting big pharma. People should make their own decisions.

00:27:26 Speaker_02
There's a debate within medicine about whether they work. And look at this anecdote of something bad that happened to somebody who got a vaccine. The same shit forever.

00:27:35 Speaker_03
His complaint that vaccination benefited the medical trade may have been related to his own occupation in hydrotherapy, a kind of quack medicine that involved treatment by bathing in, drinking, or injecting water?

00:27:49 Speaker_03
And applying it to various parts of the body. Given the hygiene practices of the era, promoting bathing was perhaps not the worst idea that he had, but it was not an effective means of preventing smallpox infection.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
I bet. So, uh, we have someone who is making these like high level philosophical objections to vaccines, like, Oh, isn't it about my personal liberties? When it turns out they're just a fucking grifter who wants to sell you some bullshit.

00:28:17 Speaker_02
And like, that's, that's the actual heart of their complaint. Last time we're going to see this. I just wanted to put it here because it's the only time this has ever happened.

00:28:23 Speaker_03
Yep, totally. It never will happen again. Got it. Check.

00:28:26 Speaker_02
And so what we have over the course of the next hundred years as more vaccines develop is this cycle emerges where there's compulsory vaccination, a ton of people get vaccinated, the disease disappears

00:28:38 Speaker_02
And then after it disappears for a while, people kind of forget how bad it was. Then you get the rise of these anti-vax orgs, like it's about my rights, blah, blah, blah. Vaccination rates fall, and then an outbreak happens.

00:28:49 Speaker_02
It's like, oh, fuck, we have smallpox again. Look how terrible this is. My god, we forgot how bad it is. Then you get people getting vaccinated again. This is the cycle that we're in now.

00:28:59 Speaker_02
Like just to spoil the ending, like this is what we're seeing now with measles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this cycle continues until the emergence of polio in the early 1900s. Polio is a poop spreading disease, it's one of the poop diseases.

00:29:14 Speaker_03
Oh, congratulations.

00:29:15 Speaker_02
I know, I had to look into poop again. You keep picking topics that lead you back to poop. I thought it was airborne, but it turns out it's poop and I had to read about poop forever.

00:29:24 Speaker_02
Polio, another thing that has kind of been memory hold about polio is that, like, the vaccine rollout for polio was a huge fucking disaster. Really? So in the 1940s and 1950s, there's a bunch of outbreaks of polio. We had 58,000 cases in 1955.

00:29:41 Speaker_02
In the early 1950s, they start testing a polio vaccine. So the way the vaccines work is they have virus material and then they blast the virus with formaldehyde, which kills the virus.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
So it's not live virus anymore, but it is still like virus material. And basically your body recognizes it enough so that next time it knocks on the door, your immune system is like, I know you, fuck off.

00:30:06 Speaker_02
But what happens in 1955 as they're rolling out this mass polio vaccination is one of the batches they forgot to add formaldehyde. What? So a hundred thousand batches of vaccine were just straight up like injecting kids with polio.

00:30:24 Speaker_03
God, so then this just becomes proof positive for anti-vax people, right? That was like, you were right all along.

00:30:32 Speaker_02
Exactly. Right. There's also, I mean, not to give the anti-vax people very much credit, but also people just in general are kind of weirded out by vaccines. I think because, you know, you're sticking a needle sometimes in an infant.

00:30:45 Speaker_02
I think a lot of people are like scared of needles in a way that they don't necessarily like realize or admit to. And most people don't know how vaccines work, right?

00:30:52 Speaker_02
It's like this weird clear liquid that's magical and you inject it in me and like maybe I feel kind of crappy for like a day, but then I'm immune to this disease that like maybe I haven't even really heard of, right? Like rubella.

00:31:04 Speaker_02
I guess I can't rubella now. I don't know what that is, but okay. There's a huge amount of trust in the medical system that is required for these things. And I sort of get, on a gut level, why people just think it's sort of weird.

00:31:14 Speaker_03
Well, also, like, even if you sort of know what you're up against, it's still injecting yourself with something you're trying not to get. Exactly. It freaks people out. And I think that's just like a little bit of a mindfuck.

00:31:26 Speaker_02
So this incident in 1955 was like a huge deal. Yeah. There's lawsuits. There's, again, another wave of organized anti-vaccine sentiment, right? So, in 1973, we get the foundation of the Association of Parents of Vaccine Damaged Children.

00:31:47 Speaker_02
And so, to return to the RFK Jr. clip that we just watched. Yes. He says that vaccines are not tested on placebos. This is, again, a fucking lie. I googled measles vaccine placebo and found many studies.

00:32:04 Speaker_02
There's one in 1963 where they test the measles vaccine against three different kinds of placebo. There's one in 1986, this is actually pretty cool, where they tested the measles vaccine on identical twins. So one got a placebo, one didn't.

00:32:17 Speaker_02
All of the COVID vaccines were tested against placebo. Rotavirus tested against placebos for years. It was like 70,000 people. It was like a bunch of different countries for years. The fucking polio vaccine was tested against saline in 1952. Yeah.

00:32:31 Speaker_02
When RFK Jr. says that none of the vaccines have been tested against placebos, what he means is that none of the current brand name vaccines have been tested against placebos. So over the years,

00:32:44 Speaker_02
The pharmaceutical companies will update the vaccines for various reasons, for like technical reasons, or like this one preserves longer, it's easier to ship, or whatever. There's various reasons that they change the formulation of the vaccine.

00:32:56 Speaker_02
And when they do that, they test the new vaccines against the old vaccines. If you're making some technical tweak to, like, the measles vaccine, it doesn't make sense to test it against a placebo.

00:33:08 Speaker_02
First of all, because what you want to know is whether it's as effective as the older formulation, right? Secondly, it's really unethical to give people placebo vaccines because they might get fucking measles.

00:33:20 Speaker_03
But Michael, he didn't return his call, smoking gun! Good lord.

00:33:26 Speaker_02
So, uh, are you ready for our next clip? Our next category of information. The next thing that conspiracy theorists do is they deliberately remove context. Okay. So this is another clip from RFK Jr. 's appearance on Joe Rogan.

00:33:49 Speaker_00
They passed the Vaccine Act in 1986, and the Vaccine Act gave immunity from liability to all vaccine companies, if you, for any injury, for negligence.

00:33:57 Speaker_00
No matter how negligent you are, no matter how reckless your conduct, no matter how toxic the agreement, how shoddily tested or manufactured the product, no matter how grievous your injury, you, your vaccine company, you cannot be sued.

00:34:08 Speaker_00
This was a huge gift for this industry because the biggest cost for every medical product is downstream liabilities. And all of a sudden, those have disappeared.

00:34:18 Speaker_00
So you're not only taking away that cost, but you're also incentivizing the production of many new vaccines. You're removing the incentive to make them safe because no matter how dangerous they are, they don't care because they can't be sued.

00:34:31 Speaker_03
I can't fathom that this is in any way accurate.

00:34:34 Speaker_02
Well, you don't think it's true that no one cares? We're just injecting just pure mercury into children. You can't file a lawsuit. You don't think that's true, Aubrey?

00:34:41 Speaker_03
Look, that's not coming from a place of, uh, I have a great deal of faith in institutional public health. systems, whatever, that's coming from a place of we're in a country where anyone can sue anyone for anything.

00:34:58 Speaker_03
I do not believe that there would be this kind of blanket immunity for an entire, like, industry. That seems wackadoo.

00:35:05 Speaker_02
I can't believe you're spoiling the next six minutes.

00:35:07 Speaker_03
Oh no, Michael, I'm so sorry. I'm fired. She's turned the pink slip on herself.

00:35:15 Speaker_02
So we are fast forwarding slightly to 1982. There's new vaccines being introduced and we have this uptake of them and then people get nervous and then it goes down and then we get an outbreak.

00:35:28 Speaker_02
So in the 1970s and 1980s, there's a couple of outbreaks of pertussis, which is whooping cough. So in the midst of this kind of vaccination and outbreak cycle, in 1982, we get a TV news special called DPT Vaccine Roulette. Oh, no.

00:35:49 Speaker_02
We are going to watch the first two minutes. So this was originally broadcast on a affiliate in Washington, D.C., but it becomes a big deal nationally.

00:36:01 Speaker_01
It's a fact of life. All children must get four DPT shots to go to school. Shots, we are told, will keep our children healthy. Shots, we are told, will protect every child from a dread disease, pertussis. It's whooping cough.

00:36:14 Speaker_01
But the DPT shot can also damage to a devastating degree. It's probably the poorest and the most dangerous vaccine that we now have.

00:36:33 Speaker_03
Cripes. It's so bad, right? Yeah, so the images are of, like, disabled kids.

00:36:38 Speaker_02
And it's horrible, like, heart effect, like, horror movie sound. Yeah. Above, like, kids with Down syndrome. Grotesque! Yeah, really grotesque.

00:36:44 Speaker_03
Like, absolutely fucking reprehensible.

00:36:47 Speaker_02
So most of the special is anecdotes of parents who are, like, Lucy was fine, and then we took her to get her DPT shot, and then immediately she had all of these developmental delays. It's basically anecdote after anecdote after anecdote.

00:37:00 Speaker_02
The HHS, sort of what she calls the medical establishment, is not really given any ability to respond. It's just like, HHS said that there was no evidence of this or something, but it's like it doesn't really dwell on it.

00:37:12 Speaker_02
And then anyone who tries to say that there's no evidence that the vaccines actually do this, it's like, you know, someone in like a lab coat

00:37:19 Speaker_02
Sort of sitting at a desk and like there isn't really a visual associated with it Yeah, where it's just the visual of like as we saw in that clip. It's like a baby being injected and immediately crying That's what sticks with you from this.

00:37:32 Speaker_03
This is big Apple morphing into a skull and crossbones territory really this like early 80s special report news magazine kind of stuff was really working overtime on that front.

00:37:46 Speaker_02
And of course later on, like far after there's any real ability to do anything about it, people look into the details of this documentary and they find that a lot of the numbers were wrong.

00:37:55 Speaker_02
A lot of the researchers whose work was cited in this report are like, that's not what our study says.

00:38:01 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's anecdotal and it's all correlation, right?

00:38:04 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, the primary structural problem with vaccines is the scale. You have millions of children every year being injected with vaccines.

00:38:15 Speaker_02
You know, something that happens in one out of 10,000 kids is going to happen a couple thousand times because so many kids are getting the vaccines. And the vaccine schedule, there's quite a few vaccines, even in 1982, that kids had to get.

00:38:28 Speaker_02
And these are also the time of development, sort of between six months and 18 months, when disabilities start to appear in kids. You start to notice speech delays, you start to notice vision impairments, hearing impairments.

00:38:39 Speaker_02
And so given the number of shots that kids are getting, and given the way that humans form patterns, we look for patterns in our brains without really realizing that's what we're doing, of course you're going to sort of

00:38:51 Speaker_02
put these two things together and be like oh my god her hearing issues started the week after she got the vaccine.

00:38:56 Speaker_03
It feels a little bit like the like my phone is listening to me crowd. Like when people are like I was just talking to my friend about this and then I got an ad for it on my phone and I'm like did you google it though?

00:39:06 Speaker_02
Dude, I used to think that I had ESP because I could very reliably predict which song was going to come on on shuffle. Like, I thought I, like, had the gift.

00:39:16 Speaker_03
It's like, of the 12 tracks on this CD, which one's coming next? That's amazing.

00:39:22 Speaker_02
Another very good book that I read for this is The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin. He talks about how this, just this, documentary results in like another increase in the size of the organized anti-vax movement.

00:39:38 Speaker_02
A bunch of parents start getting together in these organized groups, you know, they start doing newsletters and much more sort of political lobbying. And eventually they get together a bunch of lawsuits.

00:39:50 Speaker_02
So in 1978 there were two lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. In 1986, four years after this documentary, there were 250 lawsuits. And they were totaling $3 billion in damages. And some of these cases, one,

00:40:05 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:40:05 Speaker_02
Vaccines are not particularly profitable, right? They're mostly being bought in like very large quantities by like municipal governments and stuff. The drug makers are basically like, this is not worth it for us.

00:40:15 Speaker_02
What starts happening in the 1980s is the number of companies that make vaccines goes from over 20 to less than four because they're like, we can't afford the litigation. So in 1986,

00:40:30 Speaker_02
Congress passes a law with a name that will like ring in the fucking ears of the anti-vax people. The anti-vax people love the fucking name of this law. It's called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Okay.

00:40:45 Speaker_02
Which makes it sound like, ooh, kids are being injured by the vaccines. Injured by the vaccines. Yeah, absolutely. And the minute you talk about this, they'll be like, well, then why is it called the Injury Act then?

00:40:54 Speaker_03
Oh, God.

00:40:54 Speaker_02
Basically what this does is it sets up this compensation scheme that RFK Jr. mentioned obliquely in his clip. There is actually a mechanism now that if you believe your child is harmed by a vaccine, you can take your case to this compensation scheme.

00:41:09 Speaker_02
It will be heard by a sort of panel of judges. And it may or may not pay out awards. So this does actually happen. In the same way that like... Did you get side effects from the COVID vaccine? Not really, like my arm kind of ached. How about you?

00:41:23 Speaker_02
I mean I have had a bunch of them by now, but in general I had like one or two days of feeling flu-y. But again with the scale, it's like there are side effects of vaccines, right?

00:41:34 Speaker_02
And if you think about, you know, this is being given to tens of millions of people, In the bell curve of side effects of vaccines, some people really are going to be at the far tail end.

00:41:43 Speaker_02
So there are cases of kids fainting after they get vaccines, kids vomit after they get vaccines. Vaccines have side effects and risks. They're very small and they're extremely small compared to the risk of not getting vaccinated, i.e.

00:41:55 Speaker_02
getting measles or whatever else. But people really do have side effects. So when RFK Jr. says that there is this compensation scheme that protects Big Pharma from some liability for vaccines, he is telling the truth.

00:42:11 Speaker_02
However, he is also leaving out three critical pieces of context. First of all, he's ignoring all of the history that we just went over. The precipitating incident of this injury act was that there was only one producer of the Pertussis vaccine left.

00:42:28 Speaker_02
And it's easy to forget this now, but like before we had a vaccine against whooping cough, it killed 9,000 kids a year.

00:42:35 Speaker_02
So Congress was looking at a context in which the options were either have no pertussis vaccine or set up this injury compensation scheme.

00:42:45 Speaker_02
The second piece of context that he's leaving out is that these kinds of injury compensation schemes are like really standard throughout the developed world.

00:42:52 Speaker_02
Vaccines aren't like running shoes or something, where if you buy it and it sucks or it harms you, you sue the manufacturer. Vaccines are mandated by federal and state governments.

00:43:03 Speaker_02
So around the world, what governments have done is basically said, look, we are making kids take this. So it makes sense that we would take on the liability.

00:43:13 Speaker_02
And the third, and by far the most important piece of context that he's leaving out, is that this injury compensation scheme, which we've now had for a couple decades, has lower standards than legal standards.

00:43:26 Speaker_02
This actually makes it easier for parents to get compensation when their kids are harmed by vaccines in these rare cases.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
People have in fact gone to this compensation scheme and gotten payouts for harms of vaccines that are basically biologically implausible.

00:43:41 Speaker_02
Scientists look at this and they're like, there's really no way that a vaccine could have done this, but we can't really prove that a vaccine didn't cause this disability or this harm, and so we're going to pay this person out.

00:43:53 Speaker_02
That's something that would never happen if these parents were forced to come together as a group, file a class action lawsuit, go through this whole years-long process, finally get in a war, there's then an appeal, etc., etc.

00:44:06 Speaker_02
This is actually a better process if you believe that your children were harmed by vaccines.

00:44:12 Speaker_03
Man, I'm hearing you say all of this, and I'm also staring at this screen of YouTube. And the very first comment is, I am by no means a scientist, but the second I saw they didn't have any liability, I knew I wouldn't be taking it. There you go.

00:44:29 Speaker_03
1,000 likes.

00:44:31 Speaker_02
Yeah. This whole episode is just an exercise in like how much longer it takes to debunk this bullshit than it does to say it. Even this, like his interview with Joe Rogan was three hours long. We're going to do a fucking two-part episode.

00:44:44 Speaker_02
We've already been recording for like two and a half hours. We will get to like five percent. of the bullshit that he said on 12th of June, right? Just the flood, the fire hose of nonsense.

00:44:56 Speaker_02
At a certain point, you just need to be like, this is not a person who is connected with reality. And like everything that he says, you should assume that it is false.

00:45:04 Speaker_02
Unless somebody else, like somebody credible, somebody with a podcast says that it is true.

00:45:07 Speaker_03
Somebody with a pod, you know, that credibility factory that is having a USB mic. All right.

00:45:15 Speaker_02
We have one more section. The third thing that conspiracy theorists do, they are obsessed with being silenced by the scientific establishment.

00:45:27 Speaker_03
Oh my god, so the image that just popped into my mind when you said that was Marjorie Taylor Greene speaking on the floor of Congress with a mask on that said censored?

00:45:42 Speaker_02
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Jesus Christ.

00:45:43 Speaker_03
You're a sitting congressperson speaking in Congress! Who's censoring you?

00:45:49 Speaker_02
Thank you and fuck you for bringing that back into my brain. You're welcome. But actually, this clip does not deal with Marjorie Taylor Greene. This deals with Nicki Minaj being silenced.

00:46:01 Speaker_03
Oh no, it's about her cousin's testicles?

00:46:03 Speaker_02
We're mostly reading this because I think it's funny, but I'm gonna bring it back to the theme, don't worry. So this is from his Anthony Fauci book.

00:46:11 Speaker_03
By September of 2021, Dr. Fauci's power to muzzle his critics had achieved a mastery over free expression unprecedented in human history.

00:46:21 Speaker_02
Unprecedented.

00:46:22 Speaker_03
That month, with a single phrase, Dr. Fauci silenced pop icon Nicki Minaj after she questioned whether COVID vaccines might be causing problems involving testicular swelling.

00:46:35 Speaker_03
When CNN's Jake Tapper asked him about Minaj's claim, Dr. Fauci simply declared, the answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no. As usual, he cited no study to support this assertion.

00:46:47 Speaker_02
Where's the study showing it doesn't expand balls?

00:46:50 Speaker_03
Unlike RFK Jr. Yeah. Who cites literally tens of thousands of studies.

00:46:58 Speaker_02
I also love that he's saying that Dr. Fauci is like silencing her when all that happened was he went on CNN and they're like, is she right? And he's like, nah.

00:47:05 Speaker_03
I also really enjoy him referring to her as pop icon Nicki Minaj because I am certain that he had not heard of her. Nicki Minaj.

00:47:14 Speaker_03
Based on Dr. Fauci's word alone, Twitter immediately evicted Minaj from its platform, censoring her communication with her 22 million followers.

00:47:25 Speaker_03
Pharma's obedient attack dogs, CNN, CBS, and NBC, rushed onto the dogpile to defame and discredit the rapper and to assure the public that Minaj was wrong. Dr. Fauci, after all, had spoken! Exclamation point.

00:47:41 Speaker_02
Also, do you want to read the actual tweet, Aubrey? Sure!

00:47:44 Speaker_03
Sure, sure.

00:47:45 Speaker_02
This is the Nicki Minaj tweet that Dr. Fauci so cruelly silenced.

00:47:50 Speaker_03
My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine because his friend got it and became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married. Now the girl called off the wedding.

00:48:02 Speaker_03
So just prey on it and make sure you're comfortable with your decision. Not bullied.

00:48:06 Speaker_02
Think about your testicles.

00:48:08 Speaker_03
There was a lot made of this at the time. Like Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend was like the like sort of full title of this whole thing. And like she's sort of gesturing at something, which is not great.

00:48:22 Speaker_03
I don't love the gesturing that she's doing here, but she's not saying these vaccines are unsafe. I have the proof.

00:48:29 Speaker_02
Right. But this is also the thing that anti-vaxxers always do, where they keep this distance. Where they can say something and then immediately be like, oh, I never said that. I never said nobody should get the vaccine.

00:48:39 Speaker_02
I merely said that it's harming millions of children. I never said you shouldn't get it. For this, I spoke to friend of the show, Eric Garcia, and read his book, We're Not Broken, which was really good. Yay, Eric!

00:48:53 Speaker_02
And he went on me and Sarah's podcast to describe sort of the genesis of the modern anti-vax movement, which is what we're going to cover now. This is like when me and you started hearing about the anti-vax movement. It's like what's about to happen.

00:49:04 Speaker_02
I'm not going to go through like every minute detail because this has been covered like pretty extensively elsewhere.

00:49:10 Speaker_02
But one thing that I do think is really interesting to note and I noticed in the reading for this is that a word that has not come up in any of the anti-vax movements so far throughout the 70s and 80s is autism.

00:49:24 Speaker_03
Oh, interesting.

00:49:25 Speaker_02
The specific link between the MMR vaccine and autism has not been made yet. This is something that is totally constructed in the 1990s.

00:49:33 Speaker_03
Which is wild because that is the leading claim at this point. If you asked me to characterize what are the values of anti-vax movements in the US, I'd be like, well, they don't want there to be any autistic people. Step one.

00:49:49 Speaker_02
So most of this I'm getting from Brian Deer's book, The Doctor Who Fooled The World, but I'm also pulling from Neurotribes by Steve Silberman and Paul Offit's book, Autism's False Prophets.

00:49:59 Speaker_02
I really started understanding this chapter of the story once I learned that there had been all of these waves of organized anti-vax movements. So as the attention on this DPT documentary wanes, in the UK,

00:50:16 Speaker_02
There's a couple of scandals related to vaccines. So there was some sort of contamination thing where the mumps vaccine in 1992 ended up causing some cases of mumps.

00:50:30 Speaker_02
Relatively small outbreak, but the right wing tabloids, which you know I love in Britain, just very responsible institutions. Daily mail hive. Yeah, exactly. That's us. Yeah, they start

00:50:43 Speaker_02
whipping up a panic about like all of the vaccines that kids are taking. So famously one of the stories has the headline, why another needle mommy? Sort of seen as like big government, government overreach, whatever.

00:50:57 Speaker_02
So there's a whole big sort of swirling panic about vaccines in the 1990s in the UK. And there's this woman named Jackie Fletcher who starts showing up in the tabloids giving interviews. She has a son who she says was like totally normal.

00:51:12 Speaker_02
He's one year old. He then gets the MMR shot and almost immediately starts having seizures. She then starts gathering up other mothers, other people around her. This then becomes like an organized political movement.

00:51:24 Speaker_02
She and another mother of a kid who blames her kid's developmental delays on vaccines, they start placing ads in the newspaper to be like, are you a parent who blames your kid's condition on the vaccines? Come and find us.

00:51:37 Speaker_02
In 1992, they found something called Justice Awareness and Basic Support, which is JABS for short. It's actually pretty good. Good work. It's actually pretty good work. I like that. And they start working on a legal case.

00:51:51 Speaker_02
So the standards are very different in the UK. It's much harder to sue companies. But they are convinced that, you know, this technological product produced by a pharmaceutical manufacturer harmed their children.

00:52:03 Speaker_02
So they are very enthusiastic about getting together a legal case and doing some sort of the equivalent of a class action suit against one of these vaccine manufacturers. In 1995, they hire a lawyer named Richard Barr. who is going to organize this.

00:52:18 Speaker_02
There's a lot of technical criteria. He's going to sue under this weird EU law. And he has to meet all of these criteria for actually getting the case to go forward. The problem that he has is that there's no actual proof of this.

00:52:32 Speaker_02
He has to gin up some actual evidence that these people were harmed from the vaccines rather than just like, oh, they say that they were harmed by the vaccines, right? So he finds a researcher named Andrew Wakefield. Oh, I know this name.

00:52:46 Speaker_02
So Andrew Wakefield is originally like a bowel surgeon. He's sort of described as a doctor, which makes you think that he's like a research scientist, but he's like a he's like a doctor doctor.

00:52:56 Speaker_02
And he in the 80s becomes very interested in Crohn's disease. which is this autoimmune disorder that causes all kinds of stomach problems, and he really wants to understand, like, why do I have so many more patients with Crohn's disease these days?

00:53:12 Speaker_02
In the early 1990s, he says that he has this, like, eureka moment. He's in the library, he's reading all these old books, he finds that measles, the measles virus, can cause, in rare cases, ulcers.

00:53:28 Speaker_02
in people's stomach and bowels, like in their digestive system. Measles can cause this. And so he then becomes convinced that the measles... Vaccine? Exactly. So he is like, well, where are kids getting exposed to the measles virus at this point?

00:53:42 Speaker_02
Aha, it's in the vaccines. Yep. In 1993, he publishes a very janky study, quote unquote, proving this link, which is published, but then like almost immediately people start looking at it and are like, this is wrong.

00:53:55 Speaker_02
Like this just isn't this would be a really big deal if this was true. Right. And they look into it and they're like, this this is just janky as fuck.

00:54:02 Speaker_02
But even though the study is not seen as particularly credible by researchers, he starts becoming a media darling.

00:54:08 Speaker_02
So he starts showing up in these right-wing scare stories about not another needle mummy, and they'll interview this guy who's sort of like, I'm within the medical establishment, but I'm pushing back.

00:54:17 Speaker_02
He has this great forbidden knowledge kind of story about himself. So he becomes a media figure. In 1995, this lawyer for the moms finds him in one of these articles.

00:54:28 Speaker_02
And is like, aha, this guy might be my ticket to ginning up some proof for the fact that vaccines are causing developmental delays. So Richard Barr hires Andrew Wakefield.

00:54:43 Speaker_02
He will eventually be paid, adjusted for inflation, more than $1 million over the course of the next decade. They then start putting out calls to parents.

00:54:52 Speaker_02
So you can actually go back and see in the newsletter for this JABS organization, Richard Barr is like, hey, if you think your kid has been harmed by the vaccine, get in touch with Andrew Wakefield guy. He's putting together a study.

00:55:05 Speaker_02
So in 1998, he publishes his study. I'm going to send you the title because it is a nightmare and I want to hear you try to pronounce it. No. You get one try. Uh, are you gonna go like, eh, as soon as I get something wrong?

00:55:17 Speaker_02
Well, the thing is, I don't know either, so your guess is as good as mine.

00:55:20 Speaker_03
All right, I'm taking it slow. All right. Ileal lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, nonspecific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Pure clickbait.

00:55:33 Speaker_02
Yeah. It's like, wow.

00:55:34 Speaker_03
Yeah, when I see nonspecific colitis, I gotta click. They started on ileal.

00:55:40 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah. Give it to me. What this study purports to be is like, we're at a hospital in London and over the course of the last couple of months, we've had 12 kids come in with autism.

00:55:53 Speaker_02
Eight of them got autism very rapidly, almost immediately after receiving the MMR vaccine. So six days after receiving

00:56:03 Speaker_02
the MMR vaccine, they all get both this like tummy trouble, which they're calling nonspecific colitis, but like basically constipation and all kinds of like BAMU stuff basically. And they have very rapid disintegration of like developmental markers.

00:56:20 Speaker_02
Like they become nonverbal, they have like twitches, all kinds of like symptoms of like something much greater almost immediately.

00:56:28 Speaker_02
They run all kinds of tests on the kids and show that there's like ulcers and so there's all kinds of like technical like bowel stuff. Most of the paper is like totally unreadable because it's all this like super technical shit.

00:56:39 Speaker_02
The paper basically puts forward this theory that there's something in the vaccines that is like swamping the brain and crossing the blood-brain barrier and is causing some sort of like bowel disintegration and then the bowel disintegration is somehow causing autism.

00:56:57 Speaker_02
People point out later that this is very important for the paper to include this because to get legal compensation under the UK and EU product liability laws, you have to show that the product caused a unique condition and you have to show that it was rapid onset.

00:57:16 Speaker_02
You can't just be like, my kid got a vaccine and like a year later he started having headaches. And so lo and behold, this guy who was hired by a lawyer

00:57:24 Speaker_02
to give ammunition to a class action lawsuit, huh, produces perfect evidence of something that matches the legal standard for liability.

00:57:33 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:57:34 Speaker_02
Interesting stuff. What a coincidence. Shocking. So when this paper is published, the paper is published in The Lancet. which is like one of the most prestigious medical journals in the UK.

00:57:45 Speaker_02
The Royal Free Hospital, which is where he works at the time, holds a press conference where Andrew Wakefield sort of announces this to the press. He immediately goes off script.

00:57:55 Speaker_02
So of course reporters are going to be like, well, what does this mean about like getting a vaccine? He says, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together. We need to know what the role of gut inflammation is in autism.

00:58:09 Speaker_02
His like boss is like, uh, that's not justified at all. This is like a super preliminary report. But of course that clip doesn't make it on the news, right?

00:58:16 Speaker_02
What makes it on the news is, oh my God, there's these kids that immediately came down with autism after getting the vaccine. And the researcher's like, oh, we should think about like changing the vaccine schedule.

00:58:24 Speaker_03
As you're talking about this, I'm just thinking about like, how much of a theme it is on the show for the place where it was possible to make things go differently was the point between researchers and media, right? Yeah.

00:58:37 Speaker_03
That like that is really the point at which folks are getting, you know, rocket fuel for their, weird and baseless claims or they're being checked in a way that makes them uncomfortable and forces them to like sit with it a little bit, right?

00:58:52 Speaker_03
Like it just feels like had there been the same kind of journalistic energy channeled towards what's going on with Wakefield and all of this as it was happening, as there was devoted to the like DPT vaccine story, right?

00:59:10 Speaker_03
That we would have a really, really different story of this movement happening.

00:59:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, and it's also so predictable. Again, the UK has been in a constant right-wing panic about vaccines for nearly a decade at this point. We know that these movements exist. We know that this narrative is out there. They publish the article.

00:59:27 Speaker_02
They also publish a critique of the article in the same issue that is like, look, this is just 12 cases. We don't really know anything. It's super duper preliminary. But it's like,

00:59:36 Speaker_02
you didn't think to just not publish it or like wait and fucking stress test it at all.

00:59:40 Speaker_02
Like you just be like, Oh, well we're just going to print both perspectives with no acknowledgement that you know which perspective is going to end up in the fucking tabloids.

00:59:49 Speaker_03
Right. Well that's the other sort of like point of intervention that we come up against all the time is this sort of like deep desire for science to be apolitical or to exist in an apolitical landscape, which it absolutely never does.

01:00:05 Speaker_02
We're talking about the safety of people's kids. You think people don't care about this stuff? People are going to err on the side of caution with this stuff, right?

01:00:12 Speaker_02
Especially when it comes down to, like, my kid is about to be harmed in this extremely proximate way by getting a vaccine, versus if my kid doesn't get vaccines, they might get rubella, which I've never heard of, or like pertussis, which doesn't feel real to people.

01:00:25 Speaker_02
I was actually looking at statistics of like various countries and like vaccination rates over time. You can see a fucking dip in 1998. It's wild in the UK. It's like craters. And then, of course, there's a bunch of outbreaks of various things.

01:00:39 Speaker_02
And there's all kinds of other like media stuff. And then the vaccination rate goes up. But it's like even zooming out to like the century level of like, okay, what were the vaccination rates?

01:00:48 Speaker_03
You're like, hey, what's that divot in the back?

01:00:50 Speaker_02
Yeah. You can see the fucking Wakefield divot. It's fucking wild. And of course this was going to fucking happen.

01:00:55 Speaker_02
And what drives me absolutely nuts is that in this evisceration of the paper that runs alongside the paper, people do point out that this is only based on 12 kids at one hospital. This is based exclusively on the memories of the parents.

01:01:12 Speaker_02
So it's not medical records.

01:01:14 Speaker_02
And also, what I still feel like has not really been conveyed to the British public at the time, or even fucking now, is that if kids were coming down with very severe digestive issues and autism within a fucking week of getting the vaccine, we would know.

01:01:34 Speaker_02
Different countries have very different vaccination rates. and different parts of different countries, like some Indian states have much higher vaccination rates than other Indian states.

01:01:43 Speaker_02
Do you know how fucking easy it would be to look at this and be like, oh, OK, this part of India has like really high rates of bowel problems of kids. This part has much lower. Oh, weird. It matches up perfectly with the vaccines.

01:01:55 Speaker_02
In the years after this, people go back, there's a study that actually finds every single kid diagnosed with autism in a particular region of the UK, no link between symptoms of autism and vaccination. There are huge country studies

01:02:13 Speaker_02
of like, okay, the vaccination rate, you know, vaccinations became mandatory in this year. So the vaccination rate went from like 15% to like 99%. Did we see any increase in bowel stuff? Did we see any significant explosion in autism rates? No!

01:02:27 Speaker_02
Like, people have looked for this. for years and have found nothing.

01:02:32 Speaker_03
Can I ask about that? So on the scientific establishment wants to silence me, on the nobody cares about the welfare of white wealthy children, does RFK Jr. or does the anti-vax movement writ large offer a motivation for that? Oh, Big Pharma.

01:02:50 Speaker_03
Oh, just straight up like they're getting payoffs or whatever? They're in the pocket of Big Pharma, which I actually,

01:02:55 Speaker_02
Again, the best rebuttal to any conspiracy theory is to ask yourself, like, how many people would have to be in on the conspiracy for this to work? And so, even if you want to say, okay, America is lost.

01:03:08 Speaker_02
America has totally fallen to, like, Big Pharma or whatever, right? There are vaccination programs worldwide. Why would thousands of researchers in Pakistan be willing to lie about the symptoms of vaccines so that American companies can get rich?

01:03:23 Speaker_02
If vaccines are obviously harmful, we're talking about a conspiracy that involves easily a hundred thousand. researchers and like all of these, like the public health ministry of like Bangladesh has to be in on it.

01:03:35 Speaker_02
Why the fuck would they care what big pharma does? Like it doesn't make any sense. The minute you get into like the specifics of how like the global vaccination distribution system works.

01:03:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, this, that was my Rogan question. Say more about that. Why?

01:03:49 Speaker_02
Why would they do that? Like, what do you mean? So, okay. There's all kinds of problems with the paper itself. It basically never should have been published.

01:03:57 Speaker_02
Six years later, in 2004, a journalist named Brian Deer, who wrote a very good book about this entire thing, starts looking into the background of this study.

01:04:08 Speaker_02
Nobody knows any of this stuff at the time about, like, the parents are specifically being recruited because they're already anti-vaxxers, right? Nobody knows about the funding. He starts looking into it, and he finds all of it.

01:04:19 Speaker_02
He eventually tracks down the parents of all 12 of the kids who participate in the study, And he reads them the description, okay, there's like patient 11. Like, okay, your child is patient 11, these are his symptoms, this is when he got vaccinated.

01:04:34 Speaker_02
And over and over again, the parents are like, that's not true. He finds out a huge number of the kids had symptoms of autism before they got vaccinated. Other kids had symptoms of autism like eight months after they were vaccinated.

01:04:51 Speaker_02
This whole thing of like, you know, a case study, right? Twelve random kids happened to have come into our clinic over the last couple of months and they all have these same symptoms. That's not true. These kids were brought in to the clinic.

01:05:03 Speaker_02
Specifically, one kid was flown there from the Bay Area of the United States. What? A lot of these kids have conditions that make it very difficult for them to be taken out of like comfortable environments.

01:05:14 Speaker_02
It's like really stressful on these kids to travel, right? Much less go into a clinic where a bunch of tests are going to be done on them. So this is super fucked up but like the kids are given spinal taps which are like very painful.

01:05:27 Speaker_02
A lot of the kids have to be held down by like three people to get just to draw blood. There's never an ethics board that looks at this. There's eventually a trial there it's it's like a medical licensing board trial.

01:05:40 Speaker_02
It's the longest trial of this nature of its type in the UK ever. It goes on for more than two years I believe. And eventually Wakefield is stripped of his medical license. Oh wow.

01:05:51 Speaker_02
The reason why I wanted to talk about this thing of like the scientific establishment is trying to silence me is that the story of Andrew Wakefield is not a story of the scientific establishment being too mean to somebody.

01:06:03 Speaker_02
This is a story of the scientific establishment being too nice.

01:06:06 Speaker_03
Yeah, totally.

01:06:07 Speaker_02
One of the things that Brian Deer mentions numerous times in his book is how long it took him to get other scientists to admit that Wakefield was acting in bad faith. And this was a fraudulent paper. Everybody's like, no, no, no, no, no.

01:06:20 Speaker_02
He really believes this. He's doing his best. He may have just like kind of stepped over the line in a couple places. And Deere's like, dude, he's lying to you about his finances. He's lying about the basic chronology of these kids.

01:06:33 Speaker_02
He's lying about where they're based. It takes 12 years for the Lancet to retract this paper. What? Brian Deere figures out all this funding, all this recruitment of the parents and shit in 2004. They don't retract the paper until 2010. Oh, my God.

01:06:51 Speaker_02
Also, keep in mind, not only was this extremely jank balls paper published in the first place, But it was published with a fucking press conference by his employer.

01:07:00 Speaker_02
The scientific establishment was coddling this fucking guy and was like accepting just on its face shoddy work. I mean, it was a shoddy paper to begin with. Yeah, good lord.

01:07:10 Speaker_02
What we see in the story over and over again is the scientific establishment not being mean enough.

01:07:16 Speaker_02
two anti-vaxxers and fucking taking them at their word and taking them in good faith over and over again, even long after they have ceased deserving any assumption of good faith.

01:07:27 Speaker_03
Yeah. I mean, we've gotten a number of emails as a podcast from researchers and from, uh, you know, professors and folks who've sort of served as the peer research peer review part of,

01:07:41 Speaker_03
the research world who have spoken very articulately and passionately about how deeply flawed the peer review system is currently, right?

01:07:51 Speaker_03
That it's like sort of on a volunteer basis and there's a lot of bias that comes into play and reviewing different people's uh, work in different subjects of work, right?

01:08:02 Speaker_03
It makes sense to me that a system that has that many things sort of fall through the cracks, including like findings that strain credulity and don't really even pass the sniff test, right?

01:08:14 Speaker_03
Like it makes sense to me that like, you know, to hold folks to account would require a great deal of time and energy and effort and like people power that I'm guessing these journals just don't

01:08:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, I actually, one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode is the anti-vax story is a story where science gets to be the good guy.

01:08:40 Speaker_02
Despite the rest of the episodes of this show, I'm actually a huge believer in science and a huge believer in the mission of public health. I think that this is something government has to do. This is something that we do together.

01:08:51 Speaker_02
I think it's extremely important. One of the main blind spots in science that we saw back then and we still see now is they want science not to be released into a political and social context, right? It's something you hear all the time.

01:09:07 Speaker_02
Climate change shouldn't be a political issue. Totally agree. I'd love it if it wasn't, but it is.

01:09:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, I mean, it's such a tough one because it is like... there's one side that's grounded in science and there's one side that's like sort of spouting nonsense. And I would argue it's even bigger than that. Right.

01:09:25 Speaker_03
Which is like there are claims that are based in sort of scientific observance. Right. And on the other side there is like profound anxiety. Yeah.

01:09:36 Speaker_02
Yeah. Oh yeah.

01:09:37 Speaker_03
So it's not even someone's making good points and someone's making bad points. It's someone's having a conversation about information and someone else is having a conversation about feelings.

01:09:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

01:09:47 Speaker_03
So we're just like not ever gonna meet if that's the, if that remains the case.

01:09:53 Speaker_02
I want to end by circling back to RFK Jr. So It's now 1998, things are starting to happen in the UK, there's this huge wave of like both sides media.

01:10:06 Speaker_02
It's like, well, there's a debate about whether the vaccines cause autism, which like there never really meaningfully was, but this is the message that people are getting. This also is a key moment in the radicalization of RFK Jr.

01:10:19 Speaker_02
So we've talked about some of the factors, kind of the larger biographical factors that made him susceptible to conspiracy theories. But in the early 1990s,

01:10:29 Speaker_02
He has a kid who has severe allergies and this ends up being a major component of his radicalization.

01:10:38 Speaker_02
So I am going to send you an excerpt from the foreword to a book called The Peanut Allergy Epidemic which is like this really weird crank conspiracy book but they ask RFK Jr.

01:10:52 Speaker_02
to write the foreword to it in like the second edition or something and I'm gonna send this to you.

01:10:56 Speaker_03
Quote, My son Connor was born in 1994. He developed chronic asthma, food allergies, and anaphylaxis that required 29 emergency room visits before he was three years old. His brother Finn, born four years later, also developed anaphylaxis.

01:11:16 Speaker_03
What were the chances? In 1998, I was among a group of New York parents who co-founded the Food Allergy Initiative to research cures for food allergies.

01:11:26 Speaker_03
In my own research, I learned that a host of other childhood epidemics, autism, ADD, ADHD, SIDS, OCD, ASD, narcolepsy, sleep and seizure disorders, neurodevelopmental delays, autoimmune diseases, and tics all began rising in the early 1990s.

01:11:46 Speaker_03
Coincidentally, this is the time period during which the CDC dramatically expanded the vaccine schedule, raising children's exposure to mercury, aluminum, and other toxic vaccine ingredients.

01:11:59 Speaker_02
So RFK Jr. is one of these parents who's radicalized by the experience of having kids with various medical stuff.

01:12:09 Speaker_02
and he somehow finds this link to vaccines and becomes radicalized like this is this is where it comes from this is his radioactive spider yeah he doesn't talk about it that much which is weird now it makes sense right as a source code for folks like level of feelings and depth of feelings on this issue right like

01:12:30 Speaker_03
It would make sense that one of the only places that that would come from is your kids and how you feel about your kids, right? Like that, that is the time and the place that people will go to length that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise go to.

01:12:43 Speaker_02
And he's also doing the thing that we see in all forms of health grifting where he's just throwing the kitchen sink at it. He's like, Oh, the vaccines cause autism, but also ADHD and SIDS and OCD and narcolepsy.

01:12:56 Speaker_02
This is something I've seen him do in like a million interviews where he just lists off a bunch of conditions that have like no biological mechanisms similar to each other, right?

01:13:09 Speaker_02
It would be really weird if the same thing was causing ADHD and sudden infant death, right? And then as you saw a little bit of in that clip that we watched, people try to push back. They're just like, no, it's not.

01:13:23 Speaker_02
This is like the if you've had conversations with conspiracy theorists, this is every conversation where you're like, yeah, how do you know that? And they're like, well, I just think you should be able to say it.

01:13:32 Speaker_03
This is the voice of experience chiming in here when you were like, if you've ever talked to a conspiracy theorist. Oh, yeah. And then just like dropped into some deep, real stuff. I am subtweeting.

01:13:45 Speaker_02
Some very specific people. Yeah, there you go. With this entire episode and in some ways with this entire show. Glad that you've called me out for that. Yeah, you're welcome. You're calling me in.

01:13:55 Speaker_03
I mean, listen, our whole show is just a series of subtweets.

01:13:59 Speaker_02
That's the only reason anyone becomes a journalist.