AS284: Vaccines Are Not Killing Us! with Ken Camargo

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 284, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. All right, got a great interview for you today on the topic of vaccines. I was, I'll admit, inspired by Godawful Movies, great podcast, they covered the movie Vaxxed, and I thought, you know, I haven't had anyone to talk about vaccines, I don't, I, don't think, in this entire 283-episode history, I think I ever have, really. So, I wanted to do that, it's a great topic, ton to learn.

I also had said that this would be a two-parter, and you know what? I decided to just smash it into one part for you guys, um, I've got a lot of good recordings scheduled, I got another one coming up, and I thought, you know, rather than put this out in two parts, like I said I would, I'm gonna just do it in one, I prefer to err on the side of giving you guys more content, since you're so kind to support me and listen to the show, so here it is, all in one go, I don't know. My interview with Ken Camargo on the topic of vaccines, here you go.

0:01:44 Thomas: Joining me right now is Ken Camargo. Thanks for joining me on the show.

0:01:48 Ken: Well, thank you, Thomas.

0:01:50 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Why don't you tell people a little bit about yourself if you don't mind. And I've got some questions. I've gotten a lot of questions for you actually, but I'm really excited to talk to you about vaccines and the anti-vax movement and all that. But before we get there, who are you? What made you interested in this? What are your qualifications? All that good stuff, if you would tell the audience.

0:02:11 Ken: Well, I graduated as a medical doctor and then I went on to have a full career at the graduate level as a public health scholar. I had a master's and a doctoral degree in public health. I'm currently a professor at the Graduate Program here at Rio de Janeiro State University and I'm also an editor of the American Journal of Public Health, my associate editor. Today, uh, public health has been my, my career, my, my work, my life for a long time, and I have seen firsthand problems that the absence of vaccines cause, and I live in a country that up until recently, we've been having a lot of problems recently, but for a long time we've had a very good immunization program sponsored by the government, which has helped to bring down infant mortality in the whole country, including places that are very poor, that lack sanitation, lack a lot of stuff, and even then we managed with a number of measures, including vaccination, to bring childhood mortality down.

0:03:11 Ken: So it really infuriates me to see people refusing to use probably one of the best resources that we have in public health for, frankly, quite ridiculous reasons that, that are not based on anything but hearsay and internet rumors.

0:03:26 Thomas: Correct me if I've got you wrong, but it sounds like you're saying vaccines might be good. Is that something like what you're say? Okay. Oh, news to me. All right.

0:03:32 Ken: Vaccines are excellent, that's good, they're probably yeah, I mean, if you think it's a, by almost every measure that you can take to the cost benefit of death divided anything, it's, it's one of the most important, the, the shiniest tool that we have, you know, in our toolbox.

0:03:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So let me ask you, does this date back simply to, you know, Andrew Wakefield? Does this, do you know? How about the history of this? Was this something that wasn't a problem until, you know, 2000, whatever it was when his bogus study came out.

0:03:59 Ken: I think it got worse then, but I mean, anti-vaccination movements are as old as vaccines are. If you go back to the time of Jenner in the 18th century, people were saying that if you got vaccinated, there's a famous caricature that shows people having cows sprouting off of their legs and arms because of the inoculation. This was very intensive. Even here in Brazil, we had the population rioting in Rio de Janeiro when mandatory smallpox vaccine was introduced in the beginning of the 20th century. But I think this over time, this has subsided. There were a few episodes.

More recently, I think in the 80s in the US, there was a journal newscast that was made about certain issues of cough vaccine if I'm not mistaken. That were blown out of proportion by a journalist and that kept the thing going. But I think that in recent years, it got much worse. And I think basically because of two things. One of them is that vaccines, I think, is they are suffering from their own success. Since we have managed to control that many diseases, especially in developed industrialized countries, people don't get to see the consequences of not vaccinating very

0:04:10 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm, right.

0:05:20 Ken: Much. And that's one thing. You don't see the horror of other things that can come about with the lack of vaccines.

0:05:26 Thomas: Could you give us an idea of what that might look like? I mean, what did it look like before vaccines that is now...

0:05:31 Ken: Child paralysis with polio and death, if you get it, it's more likely to be fatal. Rabies is almost 100% fatal in almost every case. Measles can have very serious consequences. People try to seem to brush them off as just another childhood disease. That's not quite it, and recent studies have shown that if you get measles, you can get your immunity impaired for as long as three years after that, and that's one of the things that we have observed over time, and particularly here in Brazil, the countries that that had this problem is that children that had measles, they developed pneumonia after that, as a consequence of having the immune systems weakened, so this is not something that you see every day, anymore, but what's the common thing when those vaccines were not available.

And the other thing is the internet. Um, I used to repeat a lot an example, when I was still doing medical school, at a time there was a guy who sort of stood guard outside the university hospital distributing some leaflets that he typed himself, talking about how the communists had implanted a computer inside his head and were controlling his thoughts. He was a lone guy distributing pamphlets at the entry of the hospital.

Everyone all but ignored him. It was obvious that he had some mental issues. These days, this guy would have a Facebook page, a lot of followers. People would be sharing information about how they have computers inside their head and something like that. So it starts to get a momentum, and in the end it's reflected by the press.

0:06:15 Thomas: Right, right, mm-hmm.

0:07:02 Ken: So it creates this sort of social repercussion that you didn't have before. Exactly.

0:07:07 Thomas: Yeah, it's like if there's, I don't know, 0.1% or something of people that have some really kind crazy ideas and And they're all able to join up into one group online. They look like a bigger, significant percentage of people.

0:07:20 Ken: And Then the problem is that it's very easy, and then you can can see that you have this huge number of first-time parents, moms that are really worried about their health. Rightfully so, I empathize with that. They're worried about the health of their kids. And then they go to the internet to look for information about vaccines. And they are quite likely to fall in the pages of these loonies. I have no better word to classify that, instead of getting to proper channels. And then you have other factors playing into it. You have a lot of distrust of the establishment, man, the first of pharmaceutical industry, which as any good conspiracy theory has a grain of truth to it, but it's blown out of proportion. And then you have those people who are frightened, and they easily fall prey of this kind of silliness that abounds on the internet. It's very easy to find this kind of misinformation.

0:07:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:07 Thomas: Yeah, talking to my family, and it's the more conservative side of my family, and I was kind of somewhat persuaded by them, not at all of being anti-vax, but they persuaded me, they're not anti-vax, but that are not, you know, the typical autism, anything like that. But they said they had concerns with too many vaccines and too short a period of time and stuff like that. So one thing I would love to learn more about from you is, are there legitimate, like, safety concerns that we need to worry about with our kids and vaccinating? Or are these in themselves kind of a creation by this anti-vax movement at all? Is there any, you know, like is there any gray area there?

0:08:54 Ken: But there are two things. First of all, there are certain vaccines that do have risks. For instance, the live virus polio vaccine, the Sabin vaccine. There is a very small risk a child when is vaccinated against it might develop the actual polio. The virus might turn wild and create a case. But the odds of this happening are infinitely smaller than the odds actually getting polio and becoming paralyzed if there is an epidemic. So this vaccine was used to control polio in developing countries.

That was the case of Brazil, about by the beginning of the 80s we had rampant uh proliferation of cases of polio, particularly in the poorer part of parts of the country. Uh, and we use this vaccine to control. Now we are reverting to the uh to another vaccine that uses parts of the virus that cannot cause any harm. By this way, uh, you have a risk of that you have with practically anything of having a very severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis, that could happen. You have that with nuts or something like that. But again, the problem is that the risks of those things happening are minute. It's easier for you, I don't have the numbers of the figures here with me, but I'm not exaggerating when I say it's easier to be killed by a cow than to actually get a complication by a vaccine.

Okay, uh, yeah, it's it's all this sort of, I think the problem is that people are very bad at estimating risks, and you have to understand probabilities, it's not something that's very intuitive. One of the things that there is a lot of disinformation about it, is that in the US particularly there is a very good surveillance system for any side effects that might be associated with vaccines, vaccines.

0:10:36 Ken: And it's called the VAERS. I forgot what the acronym stands for. Anyone can make a registry there and say that I had, my son was vaccinated and had this, and it was a consequence of the vaccine. There was a very famous case when a guy wrote that the vaccine turned him into the Hulk. He did it on purpose to show how easy, then he deleted the whole thing. And the thing is, you cannot establish relationships based on one case or two cases or a very small number of cases. If I have something, for instance, I take a vaccine and afterwards something happens, that in itself is not proof or evidence that there is a connection. This is called a fallacy. It's the, there's a Latin name, but it basically says that it happened after it. So it's basically what happened before was the cause.

0:11:18 Thomas: Yeah. Causation versus correlation. Well, it's not even that, I guess. Well correlation in time.

0:11:20 Ken: Yeah. So, you have to, that's, that is, it isn't it even correlation, then you have to study a population, large population, to figure out if there is a correlation and finding for other islands, etc, so people start mining that database, the VAERS, and find out lots of correlations, but they were not investigated, there's a self reports that have to be investigated to check out etc etc

0:11:23 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah yeah. Yeah so what you're saying is so actually I have in my notes it's the vaccine adverse event reporting system and you're, saying this this is a self-reporting system. So people, so a parent and gets their kid vaccinated and then the next week or something thing, anything that's wrong with them, they might think, oh, you know what? It was that vaccine. And then they might type it into the database and that produces a bunch of unreliable data. Is that what you're saying?

0:11:46 Ken: Yeah. That's it, yeah. Exactly.

0:12:07 Ken: Yeah. Basically, that's it, and we had a lot of epidemiological studies that were done that attests to the safety of vaccines with regard to too many, too early. The thing is that vaccines have been, the the process of making the vaccines has been much perfected over the years, so what is actually being injected into the child in terms of different antigens that are present there, it's much more purified.

So again, I don't have the statistics right in front of me, but the total amount of antigens that are injected are far less that were injected 20 years ago with less vaccines because the vaccines, in a sense, are more pure, or more purify it. Yeah, so there might be some reason for concern. There are legitimate cases of people that cannot be vaccinated, uh, people with immune deficiency, for instance, uh, you should, in principle you shouldn't use live virus vaccines with them, and, but on the other hand, these are exactly the people that are protected by herd immunity, which is another issue that few people understand, and and is that you have this discourse of freedom, no, it's my child, I do whatever I please, because first of all, that's not true, because the child cannot decide by itself, and I don't know, it, we, we have an obligation to protect children everywhere. You have flaws against parental abuse for that reason. But even without regarding that, you have to think in terms of the community.

If you have a very low coverage of the population in terms vaccination, those people who cannot or who do not respond to vaccines, because no vaccine is 100% effective, with every vaccine, you'll have some people that are vaccinated and do not develop immunity, even with the vaccine, vaccine, they will be protected by the community being protected.

And if you get the percentage of people that are immune below a certain level, you are likely to have, begin again the process of transmission of those, people might be affected.

0:12:13 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:14:04 Ken: So people who have AIDS, for instance, or who have, if they're in it, deficiency immunity syndromes, diseases diseases that produce that, people who are undergoing chemotherapy or have cancer, whatever, those people who have been transplanted, those people will need this protection. So it's a failure for, it's not an individual, it is not just a matter of my individual thinking, but you are leaving the community unprotected if you fail to do so.

0:14:33 Thomas: So let me ask some really stupid questions and I apologize. Is it that, so when we're talking about this herd immunity, what's the danger or people from, I don't know, countries where there might be cases of these diseases that are pretty much gone in the U.S.? Polio, for example, or whatever it might be. Is it a question, someone jumps on a plane, therefore having all of us being immune benefits that, or are they laying dormant somehow in whatever the country might be? I know you're in Brazil, but if I'm in the US here, is that how it works?

0:14:36 Ken: Okay.

0:15:08 Ken: That depends on what, you know, it's not stupid at all. I mean, usually the stupid questions are the one that are not asked. The thing is, it depends on What disease we're talking about, there are certain diseases that are caused by viruses. So viruses, they, they cannot survive, or most of them, they can crystallize, but okay, for the most part, they need to infect a cell to survive.

0:15:30 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:15:30 Ken: So you need a person to transmit the virus to the other person, it is very rare that you have a dormant virus that will stay in the environment for a long period of time. But that the scenario that described is perfectly, if you can have it happening, you had all these outbreaks of measles in Disneyland, for instance, that in the end we map it down to one person that came from Europe or whatever. You have certain diseases, like tetanus, for instance, it's caused by a bacteria that survives under extreme conditions and can survive for a very long time, so you can get infected, you can have a wound that is infected by, you have a cut with a infected nail or something, like that, not a very large, it can be a very small cut, and then you can develop the disease after that, so,

0:15:38 Thomas: Right. Yeah. But something like tetanus, herd immunity doesn't really matter for that, does it?

0:16:20 Ken: Not that, very important, yeah, but it's important for pertussis, which is also caused by a bacteria, so you have this different situations, but the scenario that you just described is perfectly plausible, and we've seen that happen over time.

0:16:22 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

0:16:33 Thomas: Uh-huh. You talk about that measles epidemic? I mean, that was a case of someone just, you know, hopped on a plane from Europe and, or it's,

0:16:33 Ken: Yeah. I wouldn't call it an epidemic, but there was something that said it's an outbreak, uh, it was it managed to limit over time, I think, there were, because it can, if you detect it early enough, you can have people around being vaccinated or use restrictive measures. Uh, we had that with the SARS epidemic, people were confined to the houses, you have this kind of thing, this, this is a very extreme measure, but still, very can be effective for over a short period of time. I think so, because if you look at the, if the problem with measles is that it's the worst possible case in, in this thing, because, uh, it's very contagious, the virus can survive for a relatively large period of time outside the body and being still infected, and you need a high degree of protection.

There is a measure that is called the R0, which is based on the number of people that can be infected by one infected person, and it's very high in the case of measles, so one person can start an outbreak. Uh, and you need to have a protection, uh, if I'm not mistaken, you can check this later, but you have to have something like 90 or 95 percent of the population vaccinated in order to have real herd immunity to, to measles. It's a little low, the threshold is usually above 80 percent, but in the case of needles, very important to have

0:16:43 Thomas: Okay. Outbreak. Okay.

0:17:05 Thomas: Do you think that this recent anti-vax movement had a real impact on that measles outbreak?

0:18:01 Ken: Lot of people vaccinated, so you have one chink in the armor, and that's enough to have a lot of people contaminated by it.

0:18:07 Thomas: Right. That makes sense. Why don't we tackle some more myths that you have to... It sounds like this is an issue. You actually said before we were recording, you asked if you could use profanity. And I thought, is this a topic that inspires profanity from you. Sounds like maybe it is.

0:18:19 Ken: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you can just imagine, I'm basically, I'm a physician, I was trained to, I mean, life, healing people, that's the whole idea of the profession, and then you see people refusing something that literally, literally saves lives, it's infuriating, it's like you see, you have, with, for instance, with the, uh, Jehovah's Witnesses, rejecting blood transfusion where they can save a life, it's, it's not something that you take, you can take down passively and accept as is, because the other thing is that we mentioned it before, the, those anti-vaccine types, they are very active, they're very noisy, they're very loud, uh, they are not that many, but they create a lot of problem, and they create a lot misinformation that's floating around, and this can lead people to take the wrong decision. So, so, yeah, that pisses me off. There's no other way to put it.

0:18:42 Thomas: I can imagine.

0:19:17 Thomas: Some of the common myths that you've encountered in your work with this?

0:19:21 Ken: Boy, that could make a long list. Off the top of my head.

0:19:24 Thomas: Hey, we can go through it. We got time.

0:19:27 Ken: I mean off the top of my head, first of all, the whole thing about autism. This is utterly ridiculous. As you said yourself, it was a bogus study. The guy lost his medical license in the U.K. because of that. And people treat him as a hero in the US. This is one of the most infuriating things. It's very hard from a logical point of view to prove a negative, okay?

0:19:46 Thomas: Right. Hmm.

0:19:47 Ken: But the amount of studies that were done with huge populations of tens of thousands, there was a study in Norway, it was done with a million children, showing that there is absolutely no correlation between being vaccinated and an autism. Even the idea that there is an epidemic of autism, that autism is increasing in the population, even that is arguable. And that is one of the most persistent myths. And there is a twist to that, in addition to the whole problem that there is no correlation, this is very cruel to autistic people. Imagine if you were being held as a scarecrow for making people not to take any measures. Let's say that you were, for the sake of example, left-handed, and people think that being left- handed is very bad, and say no, don't vaccinate your kid because he's going to be left-handed.

0:20:36 Ken: How would you feel about that if you were being used as the worst possible scenario? So that's one thing that lots of people in the autistic community have very bad feelings against the anti-vaccine movement because of that. That. That's one thing. The other is the whole thing about the insert package. There is a lot of words in the document that accompanies the vaccine. Also, there's a lot of incomprehension about it. There are a lot possible side effects that are listed because similarly to the VAERS, they are by law mandated to list every possible or every observed situation, no matter if if there was, if they managed or not to make evident actual correlation. So if someone said that, I don't know, I had migraines after taking the vaccine, they have to put that on the insert.

0:21:10 Thomas: Wow. Oh.

0:21:26 Ken: So people look at that and then they say, oh, because one of the most ridiculous thing is that one of inserts, it's even not in use anymore, I don't recall what vaccine was that, had a mention to autism in it, and this still being held as proof or whatever. The other thing is about the ingredients of the vaccine, and the way that people refer to them is really ridiculous.

For instance, as I said before, viruses, in order to replicate and to survive, they have to infect a living cell. Whereas you can create a culture of bacteria simply by having a growth medium that they are going to thrive in it, in the case of viruses you have to have a culture of cells and then the viruses will grow in this culture of sales that can be for instance chicken embryos which were I think I still use it in some places for making the flu vaccine And there are certain vaccines that the cultures that they are uh grown on uh were they created originally from tissue that was extracted from from aborted fetuses, but that's that's so far removed because these cells have been cultivated over 30 40 years, even the Catholic Church has no problems with it, and people keep saying that that they exaggerate the thing.

Again, so you have viruses that were grown in a tissue cell that long ago came from an aborted fetus, and they say people are being injected with fetal cells, which is absolutely not true. Foreign DNA, so you have this whole myth about the things that are being injected. Mercury is another thing that actually created a problem because you have a

0:23:02 Ken: Preservative that allows vaccines to survive for a longer time without being contaminated.

0:23:08 Thomas: Did you say mercury is That what you're, okay.

0:23:09 Ken: Mercury, yeah.

0:23:10 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, well.

0:23:11 Ken: There is a compound that has mercury in the molecule you uh called uh thimerosal, uh, which is basically uh ethyl mercury. The problem is that people confuse it with methyl mercury, which is very toxic. Ethylene Mercury is not, yeah.

0:23:23 Thomas: Overall. I mean. Obviously the problem is just a lack of trust. I mean, what, one thing that drives me insane is the idea that doctors wouldn't have known that mercury was bad. Like doctors are the one that would be able to tell you in the first place that something like that is bad, bad yet. Oh, whoops. We forgot. Ah, we just put it in the vaccine. Whoops. Sorry, our fault. I mean, I just, I can't imagine thinking that medical, that medicine as a whole is that incompetent, regardless of maybe there's some, you know, an example here or there.

0:23:24 Ken: Yeah. Yeah. It's not just incompetent it's evil it's intent of disease or whatever actually I have a hard time wrapping my head but I mean it's it's like it's lack of trust lack of actual information and an excess of uh misinformation uh one of the things that I think that comes into play this is what has been known as a couple of uh social psychologists in the us have been studying this kind of thing and they're called dunning and kruger so it became known as the dunning-kruger effect which basically states that the more ignorant you are the less you know that you're ignorant so people who are less competent in evaluations and certain things they believe that they tend to over evaluate the competence uh so

0:23:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've

0:24:33 Ken: So We have people, we used to joke a lot about that because people talk, I did my research, or do your research, and that's one of the things that infuriates me really a lot, because come on, you've spent what, a couple hours going over googling stuff, and then you say that you're an expert in vaccines, okay, you say Come on.

0:24:33 Thomas: Heard of that.

0:24:53 Thomas: Yeah,. Right.

0:24:53 Ken: And then you have to think of it's not a distrust, it's attributing evil motives to everyone involved in this. So you have a huge worldwide conspiracy that affects everyone everywhere to do what to? I don't know what they think they are thinking, really.

0:25:07 Thomas: Well, yeah. Well,. Yeah. Let's, Let's talk about that. But first, I wanted to go back to that side effect thing, because I was just thinking the side effects of everything I take, any medication, are ridiculous. Like, I get almost no value out of this list of side effects that might possibly happen to me. I mean, every single medication is everything, pretty much. It's like death, all this stuff. And I could imagine that that's just stuff, maybe medication I'm taking, that's something thing that maybe a small, a certain percentage of people might be taking and might have reported. Vaccines, it seems to me, in this country, that's going to be an incredibly high percentage of people who have taken or have had them. And therefore, the amount of different things that people might have recorded is going tobe even more. So it makes sense that the list of all possible side effects is goingto be ridiculous when it comes to vaccines.

0:25:31 Ken: Yeah. Yeah. And especially if they are not actual side effects. If you're just reporting things that happened after you took the vaccine, which is basically what people are looking into.

0:26:03 Thomas: Yeah, right. So let's talk about these evil motives and how much money you're making from big pharma right now. Do I get any of that by the way? How do I get cut in on that or how does your deal work? Is it, can I get a referral fee or

0:26:21 Ken: I'm a civil servant. I work at the university. I got, I really should get some money from this, I'm not getting, uh, for most people, uh, even in the U.S. that, you have to think that's another problem with the thing, that that people tend to be very U. S. centric and things in terms of

0:26:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:38 Thomas: Yeah. So apologies. I am very us centric.

0:26:40 Ken: No no, no, but I mean, it's the whole thing, medicine is not for profit as it is in the U.S., everywhere in the world. Here in Brazil, for instance, all the vaccines are paid by taxes, basically. So it's the government. We have a public facility which is affiliated. It's a research institution that produces vaccines in Brazil for the public. And you have socialized medicine in most of Europe. So not necessarily there is a profit factor. And even with the pharmaceutical industry that produces it, it's a tiny fraction of the total income that comes from vaccines. It's not a cash call, as people imagine, and for physicians in the U.S., there is not really that much money to get in on with vaccines. That's one of the things I was saying, there is a grain of truth to certain things. The pharmaceutical industry is known to have done some very bad things over time.

There were certain problems, we had the Vioxx case, the drug that, uh, had severe side effects that weren't reported that adequately, that was taken off the market, but it was taken off the market, uh, the systems of surveillance worked and sold out. People always come with things like, uh, thalidomide, for instance, that you have this huge problem in the 60s, uh, that was one of the reasons why the FDA was created in the U.S. So what people fail to see is that even when you have problems, those Those problems were pointed out by Biomedical Science, not

0:26:49 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Right.

0:28:07 Ken: By anyone else.

0:28:08 Thomas: You know, know, you bring up two great points that come to mind. I just want to kind of emphasize them. Yeah. Be U.S.-centric again, if it was all about big pharma here and the profit motive of our health care, one would expect that in other countries where that's not the case, where, you know, like you said, in Brazil, the government just pays some money to have these vaccines done. There's no possible profit motive on it, really. You would expect it, they, that would be totally different. The vaccine misinformation or whatever allegedly would be just totally different in this country versus another country or something like that.

And then another thing that you brought up that makes a lot of sense is if the whole idea were the profit motive of a doctors or be big pharma or any combination of all these people, why on earth would they have made something that causes autism? Like, wouldn't you, wouldn't they just, uh, here's some sugar water or something, you know, here's the, here's the vaccine that we're going to decide to misinform everybody on. And it just has no side effects or, you know, why, why would go

0:28:08 Ken: Yeah. Yeah yeah

0:29:11 Thomas: To the trouble to make something bad? That's going to harm people. And there's not like there's another additional sales to be made on autism, you Know, or something like, wouldn't it just be a, some sort of harmless concoction that we would just pretend does something.

0:29:27 Ken: Well then they come out with other explanations that they, uh, vaccines may create, cause cancer, or or the last one, I'd rather make you gay or whatever it, yeah.

0:29:33 Thomas: Yeah. Well, you now how much money that makes big pharma being gay.

0:29:38 Ken: Yeah being gay, I don't think so, you know, you have, you have this terrible secret gay agenda that's

0:29:46 Thomas: Yeah yeah, it's funny how no two conspiracy theorists are alike, you know, there's probably, you never know, you know, which where you're gonna go if you go down the rabbit hole

0:29:49 Ken: No but you know what, yeah, that it's the rabbit hole and the thing is that they tend to cluster together, so it's very common to have people who believe in conspiracy theories to, in in the case of, uh, the anti-vaccine movement, to believe all sorts of crazy things, like you have people will believe in the whole thing of chemtrails and and then flat earth and whatnot and

0:30:00 Thomas: Mm-hmm yeah I'm sure you've seen the meme about the vaccine to prevent chemtrail illness or whatever

0:30:22 Ken: Yeah yeah, that's going to blow their minds everywhere, yeah. That sort of the great ideas, but the thing that comes to my mind there is, is a a British sociologist of science called Harry Collins, uh, he's written a great deal about the the sociology of expertise, uh, he has a book he wrote with another sociologist called Trevor Pinch called Dr. Golem, uh, which is a discussion of science, technology, and medicine, it's a very critical point of view, he's a sociologist, but by the end of the book he says something, I'm quoting off the top of my head, the words are not exactly that, but I think I'm being faithful to it, he says science. Science may have its problems, it may have had problems over time, but when you look at medicine, probably science is the better way to bet, especially when it's under constant criticism. So I think that's basically the idea. It's very easy to give in to conspiracy theories.

0:30:22 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:31:13 Ken: I think there's another element to that, I, allow me to go on a tangent for a while, is that we live in a very complex world and for most people we feel that we have absolutely no control of of anything. So part of of the appeal, I think, of this crazy conspiracy theories is that it gives people a sensation of being special, uh, of of being, of being more, of smarter than anyone else, of outsmarting the people, they are very well it's

0:31:33 Thomas: Oh my gosh, I've said that exact thing on the show regarding, uh, alternative medicine in general. I totally agree with that.

0:31:46 Ken: It's germane, it's the main, it makes part of the same complex, I think, and you know, and the whole thing is a sort of revenge against the the this evil know-all people that are trying to control us that don't, so much then I can show them that I know more than them, or well, I'm not going to be fooled by them or whatever. So I think there is a degree of that, that's a reaction to this feeling of importance. And I think the problem is that the conjunction of these things makes it very hard to address it. I think there are some people that are so gone into the rabbit hole that they'll never come back.

I think the actual audience for this kind of discussion is the vast majority of people that might be doubt about something, that might have read some of those silly things on the internet, that might want stick it up to the man or whatever. And I think that those are the ones that we have to reach. And try to say, look, just think about what you're saying. If you take this conspiracy to the logical consequences, but who on earth is going to try to poison every kid everywhere? Because another thing that is in common with the whole chemtrail thing is that this is a plot to depopulate the world and people say, oh, that's going very well,

0:31:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

0:33:03 Ken: Isn't it? The population is increasing everywhere. That's a very good plot. I don't know. So

0:33:04 Thomas: Yeah. Can you tell me about the flu shot? I would say that's the most common one that I'm not even sure what I know about the flu shot, that's misinformation and what isn't. Sometimes it's hard to separate it out. How, how effective is it? Should we all get it? Uh, common knowledge of it is like they, you know, scientists take a guess, an educated guess on what, yeah, yeah.

0:33:30 Ken: It is an educated guess to some extent, because the problem is, as someone said, forecasts of the past is perfect. But if you try to look at the forecast, it's much messier. The problem is to try to figure out from early warnings what kind of virus. The problem with the flu virus, the influenza virus, has some parts of the structure that mutate very quickly. And so you can have flu in one year and then you can't have flu again in the next year because it's a different strain of the virus.

0:34:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:00 Ken: And the thing is, there is a little guesswork involved in trying to figure out what kind of virus is going to be involved in the next epidemic based on certain early warnings. So it's the vaccine is never as highly effective as, for instance, the measles vaccine that we use. We call those serotypes because it's the kind of the different type of immune response that they produce. So the measles virus has only one serotype. So one vaccine takes care of, even if you have some variation among them. But in the case of the flu virus, that's not the case. So that's one problem. You don't have the vaccine. It's not necessarily very effective. But two things you have to take into consideration. Even when it's not 100% effective, it has been shown to at least blunt the effects. You can still get the flu, but you probably won't get such a terrible case as you would have. And in certain instances, particularly with pregnant women and more fragile people, infants, elderly, that alone can be the difference between life and death. And the other thing is, I go again into the whole, uh, herd immunity thing.

0:35:07 Thomas: Sure.

0:35:07 Ken: And the creating a blockage of all, uh, some studies have shown, for instance, that if you immunize people who work with the elderly with a vaccine, that protects the elderly as well. So the recommendations vary a lot from country to country. Uh, here in Brazil we don't have it for everyone. Uh, it's recommended for, uh, basically I think for pregnant women and for people over 60 years of age. But it, I think the basic idea is there was epidemiological studies that were done in each country, and so people have a good idea of who is in higher risk than who. So basically the recommendations that are made take this into account and they should be followed, uh,

0:35:44 Thomas: Right. Right. Is there any ever, any possibility of getting rid of that damn thing? Like we all got the flu shot every year forever. I mean would it, would we ever kill it? Is it just too impossible?

0:35:55 Ken: Unlikely that, because of that, of what I said, it changes so rapidly. What... It seems there are some vaccines that, but this is a very early stage, I don't know. The the problem is that you see, that's one thing that you see a lot in in the news, someone discovered a new drug that's going to cure everything. But the path between finding something that looks promising in the lab and actually creating a drug or a vaccine or whatever or a medical device that works in the field, that's available, you have to test it a lot. You have, you go through a lot of phases. Oh, that's another common myth, that no vaccine was ever tested. That's quite the opposite. They were all very, very much very passive, everyone goes to the blind. Anyway, you have all these phases that you have to go through: preclinical trials, phase one, phase two, phase three, whatever.

Every Every single vaccine has to go through this. Otherwise, they won't be approved for general use in the population. But that applies to everything in the medical arena. And there has a lot of pressure being put on having more transparency with regard to that. But anyway, the cycle, the life cycle for developing any medical technology takes a long time. So going back to what I was saying, there has been some rumors about a new technique of producing a vaccine that would affect the protein in the virus that doesn't change that much. If that pans out, there would be a possibility of not having every year to take the vaccine, but maybe taking one year or two doses and then having boosts every 10 years or so, that as you do with other vaccines. But

0:35:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:21 Thomas: Every single vaccine that we take. Right, right.

0:37:21 Thomas: Wow.

0:37:22 Ken: As I said, this is a very early stage. It's very hard to say it's whether it's going to work out or not. So for the foreseeable future, sorry, the needle

0:37:24 Thomas: Right. Yeah. It's like the flu is like a nemesis, you know, we just can't get rid of it. It is frustrating. One more flu question and we can move on. But how common is it, if you know... Sorry if you don't know off the top of your head, but how common is it to get the flu from the vaccine? That's another thing I hear people worrying about all the time and complaining about.

0:37:32 Ken: Yeah, again, I don't have the numbers. It's very, very rare to get the full flu. You have flu-like symptoms when you take the vaccine, because again it's a live virus vaccine, it's an attenuated form of the virus. So what you're doing with the vaccine, with the live virus, you are creating an artificial disease that by definition is much, much, much less harmful than the actual thing. It can be asymptomatic, or you can have very mild symptoms. But to have of the full flu, I think this is very rare. It's not as freaking. The problem is that people tend to confuse, when they get a cold, you can, a very bad cold, and think it's the flu.

0:38:22 Thomas: Okay, right.

0:38:28 Ken: It's not actually the case.

0:38:30 Thomas: Actually, stupid question. How can you tell then when you have the flu? Is it just the more extreme symptoms or is there some easy way to know?

0:38:37 Ken: Extreme symptoms that you'd have to be absolutely sure. They have to have a diagnosis of the virus itself, or an antibody, or something like that. But, but you have certain symptoms that are different. The common cold usually affects more of the higher respiratory tract. So it's usually more affects the nose and throat. With the flu, you're going to have more compromising of the lungs, but this is more, the problem with medicine is nothing is ever exactly like the books, you know? And you have, you always have this odd case that looks a bit different than people. That's one of the reasons that sometimes people take a long time to diagnose something that apparently would be simple to diagnose, but you have a lot of atypical cases.

0:38:44 Thomas: Oh, okay. Right, right, right?

0:39:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Medicine sounds hard. Sounds pretty difficult. So, in your medical opinion, then, it's worth it if anyone can get the flu shot, if it's available to me or to anyone, get it. Is that what you're saying?

0:39:19 Ken: Oh, yeah. Very.

0:39:31 Ken: If it's recommended by the local authorities, get it, by all means. And if you are a health worker, if you work in health care, by All Means, you have to. It's part of your professional obligation. That's another thing that infuriates me and infuriats a lot of nurses that I know is that there is a group of crazy people called the Nurses Against Vaccination. That makes even less sense. It's like saying it's the, I don't know, airline pilots against flight

0:39:34 Thomas: Okay, cool.

0:39:56 Thomas: I was going to say astronauts in favor of flat Earth or something. Yeah.

0:39:58 Ken: Computers. Yeah, or astronauts against the use of oxygen.

0:40:05 Ken: So if you are a healthcare professional, you have to. Because some of them are complaining that the employer was forcing them to wear surgical masks when they were working with patients. I think that they're getting off easily and I think these people should be fired in there because they usually basically you you you show a lack of understanding of something that's very basic to the profession, and also lack of ethical commitment to the patients.

0:40:29 Thomas: What's your opinion on mandating vaccines? I think there's some new laws that are possibly, you know, looking to do that kind of thing. Do you have a view on that?

0:40:38 Ken: Tough one. What you have in the U.S., what you've had with SB 227, for instance, California, is not a mandate. It just says that if you take your child to public school, you have to vaccinate them, which I think is basically very reasonable. It's a trade-off. You want to have your child taken care of by the state, so you have to provide certain safety for the other kids that are going to be there. Uh, there was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1905 that said that compulsory vaccination, even if you come to that, is is legal, is is constitutional. Um, I'd rather avoid that.

0:40:51 Thomas: Sure. Right.

0:41:12 Ken: But if push comes to shove, I think if you have an epidemic, for instance, if you have a situation that is a real public health emergency. We can be very, very anti-democratic when you are imposing certain measures. I mean, in terms of quarantine, for instance, you are depriving people of liberty, of the freedom to move around. But there is a reason for that. No one's doing that for the sake of depriving people, but for the greater good. I think there are situations. That's one of the things in public health we tend to think in terms of the collective. People don't like that sometimes. You have certain situations where you have a clash of the individual uh from ethical protection of the individual, protection of the collective.

I wouldn't say that in every situation one trumps the other, but we have to look into into case by case situation. But there are certain things like for instance with tobacco, sorry, your right to smoke ends with my right to have my lungs clean. So I think that for instance forbidding people to smoke inside closed environments, that's a no-brainer uh and and there was a great struggle to for doing that because of the tobacco industry, etc. So uh, yeah.

0:41:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Right, right, yeah, but now it seems so, it seems, so common. It's amazing when you see a movie or something and there's smoking in a restaurant, there's a smoking section in a restaraunt or something, As though though that Like makes a difference, yeah.

0:42:23 Ken: Yeah. In airplanes. You Had smoking section in airplanes that was the craziest thing I I I'm quite old. I managed to fly in airplanes that you had the seats on the left were for non-smokers, and I always kept imagining how they think the smoke is going to behave like it's going to be restricted to the right side of the plane, whatever, but actually this is one of the greatest triumphs of public health worldwide uh is how we manage. But there there are problems with that because we managed to reduce use of tobacco in industrialized countries and then the industry went to Africa and Asia where you don't have this kind of law.

0:42:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Really? Seems to make very little difference. Right. Right.

0:42:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:00 Ken: And they are creating all kind of havoc there. Uh, but it, in a sense, we managed to denormalize the use of tobacco. Perhaps that's something that has to be done with regard, again, with regards to not vaccinating, is to create

0:43:12 Thomas: Yeah, it seems like it's it's so unfortunate that some major kind of public figures got behind this thing and and made it, you know, more palatable and and sold it. You know, it's really unfortunate. I could imagine if the same number of anti-vaxxers minus you, you know, a handful of famous people happen to, happen to exist, I bet there would have been way less of an effect than just having it.

0:43:14 Ken: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:43:37 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Jenny McCarthy and,

0:43:37 Ken: Thank you Jenny Bacardi is one of the most notorious, and and and yeah, you're right.

0:43:42 Thomas: And are they still going strong? I mean, how, I, I don't, I'll be honest, I don't follow it a whole lot. Are they still, is the anti-vax movement still strongly in, in, in kind of the, I dunno, the Hollywood culture or the, yeah.

0:43:53 Ken: Don't think so. I think there are some B-list celebrities like Rob Schneider or whatever. But people moved on to autism. And then they are sponsoring all kinds of crazy quote-unquote therapies for autistic kids that some of them are basically abuse. That might be something that you might look into making a podcast about it as well. Well, the so-called biomedical treatments of autism that are awful. One of the things that there are a group of people that do is to give a combination of substances that basically a bleach, they administer bleach to children orally and through anemones. And you can imagine all the kinds of problems, even a small dose, the kind of problem that this kind of thing creates. And you have this huge, they call it a magical mineral cure.

0:43:56 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

0:44:41 Ken: It's so real, the names that they choose. So, yep,

0:44:43 Thomas: It's, I mean, what comes to mind is like gay conversion therapy when you talk about that. I mean just random horrible nonsense to just that they, somebody thinks is going to cure somebody of something that they can't really be cured of.

0:44:51 Ken: Actually they don't need to be cured, that's one of the things with regards to autism. Well, gay, absolutely, and even in the case of autism, you have certain problems with very severe cases, but for the most part, we talk about people who are just different, they have a different way of being and instead of trying to force them into the same mode as everyone we should try to work out to see how we can create a world that everyone can live and exist in.

0:44:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:45:22 Ken: You

0:45:22 Thomas: Well, sure. I means, I would have to say like, if given the choice, like I would rather my kid not be autistic. I understand. There's certain things I have that I would rather my kid not be. It's not like it's a, I don't know, it's not, like, that should necessarily be a big insult, but maybe it has to be. I don't know. Have scoliosis. Yeah. I don't want my kid to have that. It's like, mm-hmm.

0:45:43 Ken: Yeah, but I mean, In terms of autism you look at some people, some many people that are so capable, and and possibly the kind of autism that they have play a role into this, and I honestly, I cannot see one way or the other. I think, I think that you you are, are right on one thing. If you, if you leave the autism issue aside for a second, uh, you can get to us, to an extent, people tend to, uh, the barriers that certain people have to live through with in life, and you have, I saw once a wonderful woman talking about this kind of thing, that you have the person who has no arms and paint with their feet or whatever, ever, okay, this is very good for them, I have nothing against it, but people try to hold everyone that has the same problem to the same standard, and that can be very cruel and

0:45:55 Thomas: Right. Oh, yeah. It's, it's not to say that. Yeah, mm. Mm-hmm.

0:46:28 Thomas: Sure,

0:46:28 Ken: Insensitive to people who have important limitations, and I think that mental health issues are one of those areas that, uh, you have all the stigma associated with it, so you have people with depression, for instance, they are treated as if they were weak or something, have just right now, uh, the candidate which Neymar will not mention, saying that people who get the veterans who have PTSD are not strong enough or something like that. That's very cruel if you think about it and unfair in the end.

We're going off the reservation a bit but I think you have to have at the same time, I think more tolerance and understanding, and to see that certain people are going to need special help and we have to have that available for them, and we should not hold them to the center of the very exceptional people that manage to overcome every odd and then they become Olympic athletes, they have the, we have the Paralympics games here in Rio recently, so I think they are amazing people, but I wouldn't— I wouldn't, I don't think we can hold every single person that have the same kind of limitation to the same standard, that's, that's, we don't do that with people, that's ableism, we don't do that with people who do not have any kind of special need, you

0:46:58 Thomas: That's okay.

0:47:07 Thomas: Sure. Right,

0:47:38 Ken: Don't expect every child to win a Nobel Prize or something like that, so yeah.

0:47:42 Thomas: Right. Yeah. It does set up big expectations for people who might not be able to fulfill them. Yeah, well, let's get back to some of the myths then maybe. What about, because I was thinking about for a given individual, tell me where the flaw in this thinking is. If I look at, and I think you've mentioned it, the fact that vaccines are victim of their own success. I think that makes a lot of sense. That sounds right. If I look at that, and let's say I'm a first-time parent, I don't know much. I've seen there might be some danger in vaccines of some kind. And like you've said, there might be a very, very small, but legitimate danger. Again, very smaller, but legitimate. And I might say, well, we've got this good herd immunity going. No one I know has gotten any of these things. I have never seen anyone get one of these diseases. What's the problem in me just saying, I don't want to vaccinate my kids because they might have a reaction to it.

0:47:48 Ken: The

0:48:38 Thomas: Something bad might happen as a result of this thing, whereas I don't know anybody who's getting these diseases? Where's the error in that thinking?

0:48:48 Ken: Is precisely, uh, it's just like voting, if you think, well, my vote doesn't, doesn't make a difference, so I'm going to stay at home and enjoy my day, if everyone thinks the same way, I think you're going to have an election with lots of abstinence, and someone's going to get elected, so it's kind of the same thing, uh, yes, yes, you can hide in the herd. That's freeloading in one sense.

0:49:09 Thomas: But if we all start doing that, then there's no more herd to hide In. Yeah.

0:49:12 Ken: Then it's gone. Then you are not going to have the herd protection. Right now you have that to a certain level. So basically people who are trying to refuse to immunize their kids are trying to have the kick needed in the sense that the kids are protected by the other kids and they are not incurring any any risk but it might not work out very well, uh, and it hasn't in certain places and again we have this measles epidemics which brings me this one very important thing that was leaving out that you see in this report, so most of the people that had the the measles in the outbreak were vaccinated, yes, but there is a mathematical trick behind that because if you look, for instance, if you have let's say you have a hundred people who have the disease and 90 of them had the vaccine or something like that, or 50 of them, let's say 60 of them had the vaccine. So you could say, well, the majority of the cases were among vaccinated people.

0:49:12 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:50:03 Thomas: I do remember seeing people saying, hey, it doesn't even work, look at That.

0:50:06 Ken: Yeah. But the thing is, you have to consider how many people got the disease among the vaccinated and how many people got the disease among the non-vaccinated. And since the non-vaccinated, that's unfortunately a very small minority, actually a larger proportion, you have a higher incidence of the disease among the non-vaccinated than among the vaccinated. The thing is you have so many more vaccinated people that in the end you are bound to have more people with the disease in the sample of people that got it, but it's not proportional. Like you have a thousand people who have been vaccinated and a hundred people who haven't been vaccinated. So if you have 60 people out of the thousand, that is far less than 40 people out out of a hundred. With and that's a a reasoning, a mathematical reason, is very obvious when you point it to that, people usually don't make You.

0:50:50 Thomas: Right. Right. Is the measles like the flu and that it would have been a lesser case because of the vaccination, or is it kind of a binary thing?

0:51:05 Ken: You can have that you don't know beforehand who is actually going to be protected from the vaccine, so you might have something like that, and you might have someone who absolutely, even if you vaccinate, has no protection at all because of some idiosyncrasy of their immune system which doesn't respond to that particular virus or something like that?

0:51:06 Thomas: Right.

0:51:23 Thomas: Are there, so there's a certain number of people or certain percentage that the vaccine just doesn't really even produce immunity for, or is that Unique to measles or is that all of them?

0:51:31 Ken: Yeah, usually all of them. Usually you have the effectiveness of vaccines are something between 80% and 90%. So we always have 5% to 20% of the population will not respond to the vaccine. Again, that's why it's very important to have everyone vaccinated so you have very limited, et cetera, et zebra, et servo.

0:51:35 Thomas: Right, right. Okay. Herd immunity. Yeah, because it sounds like the ways that people might not be protected are kind of adding up when you list them all. I mean, the 15, 20, or 5, 10, 15, 15% of people that randomly just might not be protected. And then people like you said on chemo or people who couldn't, lots of groups of people who couldn't get the vaccination for various reasons. So it makes sense. There's, it's starting to add up the number of people who need to be protected by herd immunity.

0:52:19 Thomas: Are there, I'm guessing there's, there's mathematical models like you referenced earlier, how many people you need, what percentage you need in order to have good immunity. And yeah. And I

0:52:00 Ken: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. This is based on that calculation of the R0, the time that people have to respond, the effectiveness of the pathogen to jump from one person to the other. You can have rather simple, very complex models that usually factor in to figure out the amount of the threshold that you have to have in the population. That's usually what us public health people set as a goal. We're going to have vaccination. We expect to have 80% of the children vaccinated this year, and if we don't manage to, we start to look into it and figure out ways to fulfill the quota.

0:52:38 Thomas: Bet those models can get kind of scary. If you, if you punch the numbers a certain way, you have a zombie infestation or something.

0:53:06 Ken: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, models of zombie infestation are very scary because there is no way out from them. Fortunately, that's not something that you're concerned about zombies and vampires, usually the simulation that people make in the end, you're done

0:53:15 Thomas: Topic for another show. Yeah. Yeah, you got to play with the numbers. You got to see how many they can infect. That's the problem. Yeah, how many, yeah. Depends on that. What about vaccinations with adults? That's something I just do not spend a lot of time thinking about. And I wonder, I mean, how, how quick, how much do you think and how quickly could I be out of date with my vaccinations if I'm not careful? Because we always just think about kids, right? I mean, but, hmm,

0:53:22 Ken: Yeah, yeah, uh, Yeah, diphtheria and tetanus, you have to take boosters every 10 years. And you have certain special vaccines that you have taken to take under certain circumstances. For instance, here in northern Brazil, we still have the wild form of yellow fever. If we are meant to travel anywhere in that area, we're expected to take the vaccine. And that's interesting because assumed that it would last only 10 years, and now it seems to last much longer than that. There are international regulations over this kind of thing. So, for instance, when I fly from Brazil to Africa, I am required to produce document that I was vaccinated here in Brazil against yellow fever. And then you have the military, who have a lot of vaccines that they have to take to cover from diseases that are still rampant in the places of the world that they are going to, and also to the risk that something might be used as bio-warfare, like smallpox.

0:54:12 Thomas: Right, as a weapon. Hmm, right. Right. Especially if they supposedly have to be ready to go anywhere or something, you know, must have to take a lot of, have a lot of different vaccines.

0:54:46 Ken: Yeah, I don't know by heart, but I know that in the US they take a lot vaccines. Accents.

0:54:51 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So, high rates of autism? Never mind.

0:54:55 Ken: Yeah. Probably.

0:54:59 Thomas: We would, we would surely, we would notice some of these side effects. How about, you know, I meant to say earlier, the reason, one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode is there's another podcast, I'm not sure if you'd be familiar, but it's called God Awful Movies. And they just did an episode criticizing the movie Vaxxed. And it made me think, you you know what? I've never done anything on this topic. What are your thoughts on that? I have personally, I haven't seen it yet, but I heard quite a bit about it. I'm guessing that's a sore issue, sore topic for you.

0:54:59 Ken: Yeah. No. Oh, my god, yeah. Yeah. I, I couldn't get myself to to actually watch the thing. I've seen descriptions of what it's about, uh, the funny thing is that, you know, even Wakefield himself is not so radical as to say that people should not vaccinate, he's just peddling, uh, separate vaccines, which is something, it's part of actually the why he lost the license, because he was being paid by a company that, uh, by a law firm that intended to sue the manufacturers of vaccine, at the same time he had a financial interest in developing separate vaccines for measles.

0:55:36 Thomas: Right. Oh, so he wasn't saying don't vaccinate. He was saying, here, I have these special non-autism causing... Yeah. Profit motive.

0:56:02 Ken: But yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The thing is that it seems that the big smoking gun that they have is the phone conversation that a guy which was linked to the CDC had. And it's totally bogus because there is no smoking gun and the whole thing about the so-called whistleblower from the CDC was thoroughly debunked. There's no there there. It's the whole thing about the CDC destroying evidence. Again, we go back to the conspiracy terrain, and simply there is no evidence of any of that happening. What happens was a very poorly done study that showed that there was a possible elevated risk of autism for African-American boys, but that was a statistical fluke when the study was redone that disappeared. So there's nothing there.

0:56:57 Ken: And even the guy who is supposedly the whistleblower, he does not say that there is anything wrong there with regard to the vaccine. So ado about nothing in the end, But it has this effect of swaying people. One very famous case, it was Robert De Niro, um, he was going to show it at the Tribeca Movie Festival.

0:57:05 Thomas: Right. Oh, yeah.

0:57:17 Ken: What dissuaded from it, but then gave a series of interviews saying that we should look into it. Come on, we've looked into it already. Enough of that. There's... there's dozens of studies that show that there is no relationship. Can we move on to another subject, please? Can we invent another thing? Well,

0:57:33 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I'm not one for censorship, but I understand the public pressure to not show something that has such a potential danger. I really can be a danger to everybody.

0:57:46 Ken: It All Goes back To the whole issue about shouting fire in An auditorium.

0:57:50 Thomas: Yeah. Well, okay. Again, to be U.S. centric, I think that's actually okay here.

0:57:58 Ken: I, I'm all for civil liberties and freedom of speech, but the thing that people do not understand is that freedom of speak does not mean freedom of consequences from speaking, or that you are free to, you cannot divulge, uh, state secrets, for instance, uh, If I try to publish a, a specification for an A-bomb on the internet, I'm pretty sure I'll be visited by the secret service or something like that pretty soon. So, uh, or a recipe for making a bomb or whatever. So, um, this vaccine does not, not go into that, but I think that the problem is that you're presenting as a documentary something that is demonstrably false. So I think, that creates a conundrum.

0:58:14 Thomas: Yeah!

0:58:41 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, how many documentaries are like that every day, I guess? But I suppose maybe it's a question of the potential harm.

0:58:46 Ken: Yeah, yeah. What are the effects that this kind of documentaries Are going to have? If you see a documentary about the Bushmen and the Kalahari that is totally made up, that might have some remote effect on how you address issues of global health or whatever, but in this case this very very close to what people are doing, so it can have a very, a very dramatic impact in a very little time. So I don't know, maybe people should be forced to, if they, they show that they have, they would have to show the opposite view of something like this. Another problem, I think, which is more general, that goes to the hand of how science and medicine in general are reported by the press, the traditional press, so-called mainstream media, for a number of reasons, a lot of them being economic. A lot of people were laid out. Most newspapers are in trouble. That's a global thing.

0:58:50 Thomas: Yeah? Yeah, yeah.

0:59:36 Ken: They have gone through a consolidation process that you don't have as many venues for publishing as you used to have. They don't have that many voices in the public. So a lot of what is reported boils down to reports on themselves. They tend to follow the patterns of he said, she said. So everything has to have a point and counterpoint. So if I'm going to have an subject on evolution, for instance, on my newscast, I have to call a creationist to create balance.

1:00:03 Thomas: Yeah, get both sides.

1:00:05 Ken: So, yes, both sides might think it's very bad in politics in general, but particularly when it comes to science, you cannot give the same credence to climate deniers that you give to legitimate climate scientists. And so I think with the documentary, you cannot treat it the same way. The press in particular shouldn't treat the same way the bad ramblings of someone who has no basis and the vast establishment of healthcare personnel, researchers, and whatnot that are basically saying the same thing. That makes no sense at all.

1:00:37 Thomas: Yeah. Well I hope it's kind of like what you said about the laws making, mandating vaccinations. Hopefully it's something we can take care of more culturally and not legally, you know, like more, it would be nice if we could just somehow win the battle of information over it. But that's, I assume that's kind of what you're trying to do here, you know? That's certainly what I'm trying to do by having you. How do you feel about that battle? How do you feel it's going?

1:00:49 Ken: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:01:06 Thomas: Yeah.

1:01:07 Ken: Depends on the day. I don't know. It's hard to assess that. I think there are some events that are very marked, uh, we've had a number of situations in the recent weeks and months of moms that didn't vaccinate and then had a huge health scare and changed their minds, and we're trying to publicize this kind of thing as much as we can. The problem is is what you said, you have those celebrities and, man, I'm a huge De Niro fan, I'm so disappointed that he said something so stupid. Uh, so I think that we are facing a a a very, it's unequal in the sense that these people have access to certain things that we do not I

1:01:46 Thomas: Well, and there's so much better looking than we are is the problem.

1:01:47 Ken: Yeah, That's it, Jenny McCarthy definitely is much more good looking than I am.

1:01:54 Thomas: Exactly, yeah, I know. I can't, we can't compete with that. What are you and I to do? Yeah, there's no way.

1:01:57 Ken: No, no, I can't, no, Rob Schneider. On the other hand, I think to take it, uh, uh, yeah, but you know, these people have access to to to the media in general, and I think that no matter how many inroads we are making with the internet, I think we're doing an important job. The problem is that a lot of junk is on the internet, so we have to figure out ways to to try and help people to to separate the weeds from the chat. I actually wrote a paper a couple of years ago with a colleague of mine from the US on how to deal with it, based on the work of that sociologist that I quoted earlier, Collins, in the sense that we have to find allies in the general public, because one of the problems that we have is that people mistrust. There is a part of the audience that mistrusts people like me, for instance.

1:02:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. You're right. We might have a chance there.

1:02:44 Thomas: Yeah.

1:02:45 Ken: I'm a pharma. Every physician is a pharma shill. So by definition, I'm not trustworthy by that logic. So I think it's important to find allies in the general public that can become competent in understanding without necessarily being experts on the subject, they can be what Collins call interactional experts, that these people who are capable to really understand the subject matter and meaningfully engage with people in conversations about it. So I think we have to have more advocates in the general public to help with.

1:03:18 Ken: I can send you the paper if you'd like. I think I have that.

1:03:16 Thomas: That's, that's interesting. Yeah, well, oh, I would love it. I would it, you know, it reminds me so much of when I had, uh, Kevin Fulton to talk about GMOs, same sort of thing. I mean, it's just, I think, I, think, uh GMOs are maybe even in worse shape because nobody, yeah, nobody's a fan.

1:03:21 Ken: Yeah. Yeah. It's much worse, much worse. As much was you have the whole thing about Monsanto having this very bad reputation I mean, it is a corporation, I don't think that any corporation is exactly a place of sand, hood, but it is, it treated differently from every other in a sense that there is no reason for that, uh, they attribute to it almost magical powers and certainly the issue

1:03:38 Thomas: Yeah exactly. There's a big bad bad guy. Yeah.

1:03:55 Thomas: And I think with GMOs, it's even more difficult because there's virtually no chance of me personally the effects of trying to avoid GMO food. I could just avoid certain foods and then I'm fine. Nothing's going to happen to me. However, if I don't vaccinate my kids very easily, and if we all don't vaccinated very easily, it could be diseases that we would start to, yeah, exactly. But, but the, the consequences of not utilizing GMOs are mainly elsewhere. It's mainly, you know, people starving in other countries that aren't as, as, uh, as fruitful as the U S

1:03:56 Ken: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it will show So, yeah, the whole thing about golden rice, for instance, I think it's a shame.

1:04:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, any, any final thoughts here or should we call it a day?

1:04:34 Ken: I would like that people would really make an effort to become more science literate. That requires certain effort. So don't trust everything that you see or hear. Even myself, check what I'm saying. There are good sources out there that can check for anyone who is listening to this. You're trying to get me to hit you, don't you?

1:04:40 Thomas: Yeah.

1:04:50 Thomas: Like vaxxed. I'm I've tried to get you to use some of that that profanity you promised.

1:05:00 Ken: Yeah, I'm being very measured. Well, I mean, the CDC has a very good, I have a couple of links here that I could send to you later.

1:05:00 Thomas: No. Oh, absolutely. I would love that to put in the show notes. People could absolutely use that as a reference.

1:05:11 Ken: Yeah, I think because there are some very good resources for people in general about the history of vaccines and general information they can do. Of course, if you don't trust the CDC, it's not going to help a lot, but even if you do, if you trust the FDA, please take a look at it because it makes a lot of sense if you, if you consider. And the other thing is that if you see a study that says something, and it can be, first of all, you have to look at where it was published, the credentials of the person who published it. And even if we have very good people publishing something, that doesn't mean that it might be crap, even if it's done because,

1:05:14 Thomas: Please. Yeah. Oh yeah. Actually, I was going to say that earlier when you were talking about the journalism

1:05:47 Ken: Blown

1:05:47 Thomas: Problem. It seems like the biggest problem with science reporting is just any study that shows any sort of minor effect is immediately reported as news. Like, yeah, exactly.

1:05:57 Ken: Out of proportion. That the universities are to blame for that as well because they have press relations departments, the whole thing about you have to put the university in the the newspaper so they have more funding for it, so that's a game that everyone is playing the wrong way in, in my opinion but I mean you have to look to actually understand the subject. You won't get a couple of papers from Google whatever and beat them. You have to really understand that, that requires a lot of stuff, and people who are actually working in that field have dedicated their whole lives to it. So don't try to pretend that if you spend a few hours of the weekend googling stuff that you became an expert. That's not going to happen.

1:06:07 Thomas: Okay, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah,

1:06:38 Ken: I think that people should be a little humble with regard to that as well and try to be reasonable. I mean, go back to the whole thing. What's the point of such a conspiracy? You have to involve so many people for what, in the end? For causing deliberate harm to kids everywhere, uh, and just to be sure, um, I have a daughter who's now a grown-up woman, a very smart, uh, halfway through her PhD course, so I don't think that she was harmed in any way, and she took every vaccine that that was on the map, so, um, no,

1:06:39 Thomas: And once again to ask, were you not worried about the schedule? Because that's something I see, the vaccine schedule. Is it, is that like too much?

1:07:13 Ken: Uh, actually, it's the other way, yeah, actually it's another way around, that the thing that tears proposes that sees the sun with spacing out vaccines, that doesn't make sense. The vaccine schedule was thoroughly studied, and the idea is to get the maximum protection as early as possible. So if you delay the vaccine, you're delaying the time that you're going to have full protection for your child, so that doesn't make sense. There are not too many, too soon, as I said before, actually the actual amount of antigens that have been injected on the child are much less than they were, uh, the other substances are, are present in the vaccines, there are adjuvants, they're in very minute quantities that are not likely to cause any harm whatsoever. And if you space them out, you're just expanding the window that something bad can happen. So it doesn't make any sense.

1:07:16 Thomas: Oh, right, right. Well, thanks. I appreciate you coming on, Ken Camargo, uh, and educating us a little bit on this. I really appreciate it.

1:08:06 Ken: Well, I thank you for the opportunity. Actually, I more people do this.

1:08:11 Thomas: Yeah. That's why, that's why I said to Kevin Fulton, GMO is like, we got to get more people talking about, you know, science topics and increasing the level of trust, you know, and not, not blind trust or anything, but, but you know trust in well-established consensus, uh among scientific community.

1:08:21 Ken: Yeah. Yeah, listen to people, watch, Try to reason with them, try to look at what the evidence is, and and by all means get to your own conclusions, but at least make sure that the arguments that are being presented are valid, that that's a first requisite. Thank

1:08:29 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thank you so much for coming on for joining me. I really enjoyed it.

1:08:46 Ken: You.

1:09:11 Thomas: All right, that does it for this week, another good week of shows, thank you, guys, so much for listening, and thank you to my patrons over at patreon.com slash atheist, got some new ones to thank, I appreciate you guys so much, Matt Bunker, Michael Schaffer, Jason Baldus, Dom the Humanist, Greg Knight, Saccad, Bloodbeard Godslayer, Andre Ceramic, Geeker41, Sam Johnson, and Matthew Kennedy, thank you, thank you, thank you. Some of those are returning patrons actually so I appreciate that as well just as good And, then, I've got to thank my all-time greats, Hunter Ash, Sakashite Fukasumi, Jesse, Inciting Incident Podcast, The Long Black Cock, Kaylee Reiser, Zimu Zinu Jr., Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Ian Rozzano, Pretheus, Roger Metcalf, Robert schepis, Sammy, Adrian Borszczow, Blackhawks, Aerosign Sharks, Steve Sigmund, Peter Skelton, Brian Gerfort, Dale, Matt, Garrett, thank you, thank-you, thankyou, and, And.

1:10:10 Thomas: I've got a great episode coming up, I don't want to jinx it, because it's, it's still scheduled, and you never know, but, should be a really, really good, anticipated recording for Monday, and, also, next week is, Myth Information 3, Google Myth Information, come on, come down, see me, see a great debate between Price and Ehrman, and a lot of other good speakers, it is going to be great, I hope you'll come down or up, or whatever the case may be, and I can't wait to see you there. All And, with that said, I hope you have a great weekend, and I'll see you on Monday.