To Vax or Not To Vax: Educating Parents On The Options | Dr. Bob Sears, MD

Summary

Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark: Episode Summary

Episode Title: To Vax or Not To Vax: Educating Parents on The Options
Guest: Dr. Bob Sears, MD
Release Date: December 17, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, host Alex Clark welcomes renowned pediatrician Dr. Bob Sears to discuss the contentious topic of vaccination. Dr. Sears shares his extensive experience and insights on vaccine schedules, parental choice, and the broader implications of vaccination policies in today's society.

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Key Topics and Discussions

1. Vaccine-Preventable Diseases and Harm

• Dr. Sears' Experience:
  • [03:05] Dr. Sears asserts that in his 26 years of practice, he has not seen a single patient harmed by a vaccine-preventable disease.
  • [04:31] He emphasizes that both vaccinated and unvaccinated children can pose infectious risks, advocating against ostracizing families based on their vaccination choices.

2. Evolution of Vaccine Schedules

• Increase in Vaccine Dosage:
  • [06:43] Dr. Sears highlights that the childhood vaccine schedule has tripled over the past few decades, from approximately 16 injections to around 85 when including COVID-19 vaccines.
  • [07:43] He questions the necessity of adding more vaccines, suggesting financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies may play a role.

3. Financial Incentives in Pediatric Practices

• Monetary Benefits for Doctors:
  • [09:58] Dr. Sears reveals that pediatricians can earn a 20-30% profit on each vaccine dose, with end-of-year bonuses based on patient vaccination rates.
  • [12:18] He speculates that financial motivations may influence pediatricians to mandate vaccines, leading to the exclusion of non-vaccinating families from their practices.

4. Interaction with Medical Boards

• Conflict with California Medical Board:
  • [15:28] In 2015, Dr. Sears faced attempts by the California Medical Board to revoke his license due to his vaccine counseling practices.
  • [17:20] The situation was settled with probation instead of license revocation, allowing him to continue practicing while adhering to certain conditions.

5. Vaccine Safety and Research

• Lack of Comprehensive Studies:
  • [37:51] Dr. Sears contends that the CDC has not conducted extensive research proving the current vaccine schedule's safety, citing the Institute of Medicine's findings.
  • [40:33] He argues that ethical concerns prevent randomized placebo-controlled studies necessary to definitively establish vaccine safety.

6. Specific Vaccine Concerns

• Aluminum and Formaldehyde:

  • [68:01] Dr. Sears discusses the potential neurotoxicity of aluminum in vaccines, questioning the FDA's safety limits.
  • [72:06] He raises concerns about formaldehyde and other chemicals in vaccines, emphasizing the lack of thorough safety research.

• DTaP Vaccine Controversy:

  • [73:16] The DTaP vaccine is criticized for its association with severe encephalitis in the past, leading to its reformulation.

7. Autism and Vaccination

• Unresolved Links:
  • [56:15] Dr. Sears expresses uncertainty about the relationship between vaccines and autism, advocating for more comprehensive research.
  • [57:10] He observes mild autism cases in unvaccinated children, attributing autism more to environmental toxins than vaccines.

8. Parental Guidance and Practice Philosophy

• Informed Choice:
  • [23:28] Dr. Sears emphasizes guiding parents through the pros and cons of each vaccine, supporting individualized decisions.
  • [86:18] He advises parents to trust their instincts and seek pediatricians who align with a non-pharmaceutical approach to child-rearing.

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Notable Quotes

• On Vaccine Harm:

  • Dr. Bob Sears [03:05]: "I'm actually very blessed to be able to say not a single one."

• On Financial Incentives:

  • Dr. Bob Sears [10:43]: "They make about 20 or 30% profit on every vaccine dose they give."

• On Vaccine Research:

  • Dr. Bob Sears [37:51]: "Because they haven't done that research."

• On Acceptance and Culture:

  • Dr. Bob Sears [94:37]: "Acceptance of each other's differences. Because that applies to so many different areas of life."

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Insights and Conclusions

Dr. Bob Sears presents a perspective that challenges mainstream vaccination policies, emphasizing parental choice and the importance of informed decision-making. He highlights potential financial motivations behind vaccine mandates and questions the comprehensiveness of vaccine safety research. Dr. Sears advocates for acceptance of diverse medical choices within society and underscores the need for more transparent and extensive studies on vaccine safety and efficacy.

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Resources Mentioned

• Books by Dr. Bob Sears:

  • Making an Educated Decision for Your Child – An objective guide detailing each vaccine's ingredients, side effects, and rationale for inclusion in the childhood schedule.

• Website and Educational Materials:

  • Dr. Sears offers video series and webinars to provide further information and answer parental questions.

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Final Thoughts

This episode delves deep into the complexities surrounding vaccine decisions, offering listeners a platform to consider various factors influencing their choices. Dr. Sears' experiences and viewpoints provide a narrative that encourages parents to seek comprehensive information and engage in open dialogues with healthcare providers.

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Disclaimer: This summary is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Parents should consult with qualified healthcare professionals when making decisions about their children's health.

Transcript

[Alex Clark]

How many times have you seen a patient that has been harmed by a vaccine preventable disease?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Not a single one. And if any pediatrician should be seeing kids harmed, it should be me. If you are vaccinated and you trust that the vaccines are going to protect you, then what do you have to worry about? Even a fully vaccinated kid could actually catch an infection and spread it to someone else. A naturally raised immune system is going to be a healthier immune system that works better and fights off illness even better.

[Alex Clark]

How can you raise a pharma free kid in a big pharma world? Dr. Bob Sears is a pediatrician based in Orange County, California who is helping parents make an informed decision about that schedule. Whether parents do or don't vaccinate, he believes parents should be given all the information in order to have freedom in making the right medical decisions for their children. His mission is to provide families worldwide with a variety of resources that offer complete, objective and undoctored information on the complex and controversial topic of vaccines. He is the bestselling author of tons of books on this subject matter, but the one I think you will appreciate the most is the Vaccine book Making an Educated Decision for your Child. This is his flagship book that offers an objective and in depth look at each vaccine. Every vaccine on the childhood schedule is listed, broken down by ingredients, side effects, why people opt to get it, why some people may opt to not. I get lots of questions asking me, you know, what are some unbiased resources on each vaccine. This is the best book that I have found. You're going to love this man if you live in Southern Southern California. I would move hell in high water for him to be my child's pediatrician. They've tried to destroy him and his career as he will talk about, but he has come back stronger than ever. This episode has to do with the forbidden topic so it will not be on YouTube. I might tease it on Instagram, but I'm I'm thinking I'm going to have to beep the word vaccine. I'm unsure, but I will post it to my X account at Yo Alex wraps with a Z. You can also watch it on Spotify. The video version of this podcast is now on Spotify. All you have to do is search Culture apothecary. Every episode is made possible only through donations from listeners like you who value this mission to heal usit culture, make a tax deductible donation through the link in the description or support the show for free by leaving a five star review. This is extremely integral to our success. So please leave one weekly if you can follow the show on Instagram at Culture Apothecary and me at Real Alex Clark, please welcome Dr. Bob Sears to Culture Apothecary. You've been a practicing physician for over 25 years now. How many times have you seen a patient that has been harmed by a vaccine preventable disease?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That is an awesome question. And I'm actually very blessed to be able to say not a single one.

[Alex Clark]

Not a single one in 26 years. Right, so. So all of these parents that have chosen not to vaccinate their kids or your patients, and none of them have been diagnosed with a preventable disease.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Let's define the word harm. You know, the question is, have you seen anyone harmed by a disease? I've certainly seen kids catch these infections, but I wouldn't say I've ever seen a kid harmed by an infection. When I think of harm, I think of a child almost died. They have to rush to the er, get their life saved. They have to spend maybe a few weeks in the intensive care unit, that kind of thing. I've so happy to be able to say, never in my 26 years of being a pediatrician have I watched a family have to endure that type of situation with an infection. Every infection I've seen has been manageable, treatable, mostly as an outpatient. I've had to send a few kids to the hospital for IV antibiotics or IV hydration, but they were all routine cases. So that's actually one of the first things I'll tell parents in the office when I'm meeting them and they're asking me whether or not they should vaccinate is I like to kind of skip to the end of the story and tell them. The good news is that if you don't vaccinate, based on my 26 years of experience so far, I haven't seen a single baby or child harmed by one of these infections.

[Alex Clark]

Are parents who choose to not vaccinate their children, putting vaccinated children at risk?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Because that's sort of the big fear that you hear from the media and from a lot of doctors as well. I actually have colleagues who work where I work in Orange County, California, who tell their parents, never let your child play with an unvaccinated child. They treat these kids and these whole families like they are dangerous, unsafe to be around, unfit to be your friends. And that's so far from the truth, in my opinion. I feel like unvaccinated children are healthy. They pose no risk to others around Them. If you think about it, if you are vaccinated and you trust that the vaccines are going to protect you, then what do you have to worry about? About playing with kids who are not vaccinated. And of course, kids who are not vaccinated, they may catch chicken po, they may get caught up in a measles outbreak, they may catch a whooping cough, some of these infections. And vaccinated children around them are very well protected for the most part. Sometimes vaccines don't work, so even a fully vaccinated kid could actually catch an infection and spread it to someone else. I think vaccinated and unvaccinated alike can pose an infectious risk to people around them. But that's just part of life. You know, we accept that as a society, and I feel like as a society, we should never ostracize anybody for their medical decisions, because then you start going down a dark path of deciding who deserves to be an equal person in society and who doesn't.

[Alex Clark]

And that actually happened a few years ago is there were people who were unpersoned, I think is a very fair way to put it and describe it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And it's happened many times throughout the millennia of society. As long as humans have been around, they're always looking a subset of our society to be. To be prejudiced against and discriminate against. And I don't feel like anyone needs to do that with unvaccinated kids.

[Alex Clark]

Babies today in 2024 are getting the same shots that I got and my friends got in the early 90s, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Wrong. I think you asked me that question. Yeah, because you know the answer is incorrect. And that's actually why so many parents today are questioning vaccines where they wouldn't have questioned them 30 years ago. Anyone who's in their 20s or 30s or 40s or having babies today, the vaccine decision is a completely different decision than it was 20, 30 years ago. The vaccine schedule has tripled. Nowadays you actually get. I mean, if you include Covid injections, you actually get something like 85 vaccine doses throughout your whole childhood. If you were to get every vaccine recommended by the CDC from 0 to 18. Right, 0 to 18, you get about 85 injections. Back when I grew up, I probably got 16 injections. You probably got about 25 injections. So the schedule has more than tripled.

[Alex Clark]

And why is that? Why keep adding things on? Isn't it just because, oh, we found more solutions to cure more diseases?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, when vaccines started, you know, you think back to smallpox over 100 years ago, and then we developed a tetanus vaccine for, you know, injured soldiers. We developed a polio vaccine. These were diseases people used to be really, really afraid of and did cause a lot of harm to people many, many years ago. So it's more of a question of what diseases do we need vaccines for in order to help prevent these very serious outbreaks. And that might have been a good thing, you know, years ago. And most of those diseases are actually now eradicated. Even tetanus is virtually unheard of. But what has happened is that shifted to, it's no longer what vaccines should we vaccinate people against, it's what vaccines can pharmaceutical companies produce that we can vaccinate, you know, no matter what the disease is, they decide, can we make a vaccine against it? And if they can, then they get it approved by the fda, they get the CDC to promote it, and they get doctors to promote it. And then it gets added to mandated vaccine schedules, not because the vaccine is needed, but simply because it's produced. And I'd say chickenpox vaccine is probably a prime example of that. Chickenpox is a harmless infection that everyone used to catch and get lifetime immunity and even get some good immune system benefits from it. And so it's not like we decided, hey, we really need a chickenpox vaccine so we can save everyone's life and save people's lives.

[Alex Clark]

It's inconvenient. The itching.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's inconvenient. They decided when a kid catches one of the parents has to stay home with them for a week. So they said this is almost a financial decision.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, not a medical point, right? Not a medical decision. It's a financial decision. That's kind of a prime example of not a vaccine we needed to produce, but a vaccine that we could and then generate a lot of very significant revenue out of it.

[Alex Clark]

When a doctor convinces a patient to give their child a certain vaccine, do they get money personally added to their paycheck?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

They do. They do in two ways. First of all, doctors, they make about 20 or 30% profit on every vaccine dose they give. Right. And then, so I know vaccines cost about fifteen hundred dollars. I would say, like to is what it cost me to buy, like the full set of vaccines if I was going to give it to a child to go to school in California. And if you were to get every vaccine, even one's not required for school, you'd probably be spending maybe three or $4,000. And so a doctor is getting a couple thousand dollars a year off of each patient for that. But the bigger incentive is not the little bit of money they make out of each dose. It's the end of year bonuses.

[Alex Clark]

What's the end of year bonuses?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Insurances incentivize doctors to have fully vaccinated patients in their office with an end of year bonus. Sometimes it's $400 per patient, sometimes it's a percentage of your income that you made. So if you're a pediatrician and say you're making $200,000 a year, you know, on your paycheck, or $150,000 a year, your end of year bonus for having a practice full of fully vaccinated children could be as much as $50,000. A lot of people believe that financial incentives are a big factor in pediatricians mandating vaccines in their office. I would say when you have a BIG office with 10, 20 different pediatricians and they have a financial manager and an office manager, and they're like a big business trying to create this huge multi office pediatric entity, that's the kind of practice that can benefit so significantly from those vaccine incentives at the end of every year that their business managers are probably very much in favor of mandating vaccines. But I would say the individual pediatricians themselves, I don't know that they think along financial lines like that. I think they're more just believing that vaccines are so important and safe, that kids really need them. But there definitely is that financial incentive that whoever's making the financial decisions for a practice is going to be very much in favor of mandating vaccines for their patients.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. Is this why so many of my friends who have chosen to not vaccinate their children are being kicked out of their pediatrician's office? Because I didn't understand that. Why would they say you can't be a patient here? It's because they're trying to avoid not getting their bonus.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You're right. It's likely they are. In my area where I work, I'm probably one of the only pediatricians that'll see people who don't vaccinate. And so people are leaving all these other offices in droves.

[Alex Clark]

Flocking to you.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, they're all coming to me.

[Alex Clark]

Again, the holy Mecca, right? You're like the land of milk and honey in California, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm very proud to be able to provide that service to families. I feel like pediatricians, honestly mostly feel like vaccines are just so important. They're literally going to save your life if they know that if that family in front of them doesn't vaccinate that pediatrician is worried that child's gonna end up dead, you know, someday.

[Alex Clark]

Is that what they're taught in school?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That is what we're taught in school, yes.

[Alex Clark]

And why is that not the full picture? And if there is more of a full picture to that story, why wouldn't we be educating the doctors on it?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

My experience so far is I've never seen a child harmed by one of these diseases. And if any pediatrician should be seeing kids harmed, it should be me. I'm the practice where many tens of thousands of patients have come over the last 26 years to my office. Not a single one harmed by an infection. That totally rewrites the narrative that you're hearing from these other doctors, these other pediatricians who claim children are going to die if you don't vaccinate. That has not been my experience. Now, I got to admit that the risk of diseases isn't zero. I'm not saying a baby can't die of an infection if they don't vaccinate. And it's possible that getting vaccinated might actually reduce your risk of dying from that infection. But if I haven't seen Anyone harmed in 26 years, you have to think your baby's risk as an individual. If you're sitting there at home deciding to raise a pharma free child, a child without vaccines, and I've never seen a child harmed in all these years, you gotta realize that your risk is pretty close to zero. It's probably as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero. So that's why I tell parents, you don't have to be in fear of this decision. There's no rush. You know, take your time. It's not like your baby is gonna catch something and die in the first few months of life if you don't vaccinate. I mean, it could happen because it happens to a few babies every year in our country somewhere. But your individual baby among the 4 million babies born that year? Yeah, very, very unlikely.

[Alex Clark]

You are the pediatrician helping parents make an informed choice to either choose or refuse vaccines for their children. And in 2015, the California Medical Board tried to ruin your life and your career and your reputation for daring to give parents information that they wouldn't. So what did they try to do to keep you from speaking out?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, the California Medical Board tried to revoke my license to practice based on the type of vaccine advice I give in my office.

[Alex Clark]

And what is the advice that you give? Are you telling everybody, don't vaccinate your kids?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, no, not at all. I don't tell anybody what to do or what not to do. I guide them through the decision. I give them all the pros and cons. I give them great resources to read, and I happily accept them in my office if they choose to raise their kids without vaccines. And with the California Medical Board specifically. What happened was I saw a child who had a really bad vaccine reaction when he was a baby, and the parents stopped vaccinating. And then I didn't even see him back then. He wasn't even my patient. They came to me four years later and said, hey, we had this really bad reaction. Do you think we should continue vaccinating? And I said, no. You know, based on that really bad reaction, I would agree with your decision to not continue vaccines. And then that kind of morphed into other families coming to my office and telling me about their past vaccine reactions.

[Alex Clark]

Even parents that are, like, going through a divorce and one parent wants to vaccinate and one doesn't, they, like, call you into court, don't they?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, yeah, and that's actually what this first case was. Even though the parents originally agreed not to vaccinate, they ended up getting divorced. One parent wanted to vaccinate, the other parent didn't. So when I sided with the parent who didn't want to vaccinate, the other one reported me to the medical board, and the medical board said my medical decision was not justified. I was not following the standard of care for.

[Alex Clark]

And what year was this? 2015.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, I believe 2015. What are we now, 2024? Yeah, I'd say right around 2015.

[Alex Clark]

So what ended up happening? Were they able to get your take your license?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, they settled with me.

[Alex Clark]

What does that mean?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It means they offered me probation instead of removing my license.

[Alex Clark]

So are you just. You can only be a doctor and not talk about vaccines for a certain amount of time or something?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Actually, no, they can do that. They could have actually asked me to not talk about vaccines anymore, and they didn't, which I kind of find a little surprising. Basically, I had to have a doctor review my charts in the office and make sure I was following the standard of care. I had to pay a fine every month and all kinds of financial penalties. And then as I was giving this advice to more and more parents over the next few years, the medical board brought a few more cases against me and prolonged my probation and, you know, threw more fines at me. And in order to take away my license, they would have had to Take me to medical board court. That's a much bigger process. I don't know if maybe they thought they couldn't win their case against me. I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to win the case if I actually took it to court. So I was. I was advised to play the legal game and play it safe and accept the probation because that allowed me to continue practicing.

[Alex Clark]

And then when did the probation end?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

About a year ago.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, my gosh. It was that long? Bless your soul. You had to endure that for that long. Those evil creeps.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I know. And honestly, it created so much fear in me at the beginning.

[Alex Clark]

That's probably the whole intention.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, yeah, yeah. They're trying to scare people into compliance, I would imagine. And I'm thinking, I'm going to lose my practice. We're going to have to sell our house, we're going to have to move somewhere else where we can afford to live. If I can't work as a doctor anymore, what am I going to do? I was filled with a lot of fear for many months at the beginning of this. And then as it played out, I was able to let go of the fear and overcome it. And the medical board, as they kept coming after me, the fear would resurface and I'd spend months and months of sleepless nights and worry.

[Alex Clark]

You have an amazing book. One doctor versus the Medical Board. And you create this character doctor because you were like, it's too hard for me to write this book. First person of, like today. I like first person like that. You were like, I'm going to create a character to tell the story of the fight with the California Medical Board through the eyes of somebody else. And I think it's interesting, your story, is that how you became this, like, voice for parents having informed choice? Because when your first child was born, you were not the same doctor that you are today. You actually full blown wanted to vaccinate your child. It was your wife who was asking questions. The one who's not a medical professional. Right. Could you walk us through that story?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And I almost don't like telling this story because she was so right. And I was a young doctor and I thought I knew it all. Just like every doctor coming out of medical school.

[Alex Clark]

Your oldest is the same age as me, right? 31.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right, right. And my wife was questioning vaccines and their safety. We were sitting in the office with our first baby and she was actually crying, saying, these vaccines sound dangerous when they make you read the informed consent forms and the informed consent paperwork. Actually that we had to sign back then saying that we read it says your baby could die from a vaccine reaction. Your baby could be brain damaged from a vaccine reaction. She didn't want to vaccinate. And I told her, yes, I really think we should. It's really important. She even reminds me that I said, it's for the good of society. Uh oh, right. I know. Thankfully, my brain has been protected from this and I don't remember this conversation.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, you have like, you have like, where you only remember certain things. It was so traumatic. Your brain like forgot.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, but, but over the years as a pediatrician, as I was around, as I was around more and more families that chose to raise their kids vaccine free and I saw how healthy these kids are and I wasn't seeing anyone being harmed by these infections. I started to realize early in my career she might just very well be right. And so it really shifted my perspective. And I will say, my first kid, like most children, he seemed to handle vaccines just fine. A lot of kids are hardy. Their immune systems and their nervous systems are resilient and they go through the vaccines without any obvious harm. And that's why when you're talking to people, maybe people who have vaccinated their kids and people who listen to your show, maybe they've already vaccinated their kids and their kids handled it okay. They're not really worried about vaccines. They're kind of wondering, well, why should I worry? You know, what's the big deal with this conversation? The big deal is not everyone handles vaccines well. Some kids have terrible, very severe reactions. It's a minority of kids. But when it happens, it can be life changing and very devastating for them. It can permanently injure them the rest of their life. And we don't know who those kids are. I don't know which kids it's going to happen to when I'm in my office counseling them. So when I'm not seeing anyone harmed by infection, but I am seeing kids harmed by vaccines, I present that dilemma to patients and help them understand that so that they can decide which risk are they more comfortable with? Do they feel comfortable with the pharma risk, risking vaccine reactions, or are they more comfortable just sort of going through a natural approach to life and accepting that very small infection risk that's inherent in life for everybody. What do they feel better about? And that's kind of what I try to educate them on.

[Alex Clark]

And so if a parent does say, you know, I want to, I want to do the pharma risk, one Like I, I think I lean towards, I do want my child to get all vaccines or not. Do you kick them out of your office? Are they allowed to continue a patient? Do you judge them? What's your thought process on that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right, yeah. Even though 99% of my patients don't vaccinate their babies in my office.

[Alex Clark]

Is that like you're just estimating or that is really 99%?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I would say it's about 99% raise their kids without vaccines in the first few years in my office. Some of those will go on to vaccinate later for school. And occasionally one or two families will give their young baby one or two vaccines that they deem important enough to do. And that's kind of where my work has cut out for me, where I will guide them through that and help them understand, well, which vaccines might be worth doing for your baby and which ones aren't worth doing for your baby. So I help them narrow it down if they do want to vaccinate for a few things that they are really fearful of that their baby might catch. That's sort of what I spent my whole career doing, helping people whittle it down to the most important vaccines. But starting about 10 years ago, that really morphed into more and more people not even wanting to do even those vaccines, even those few that I had deemed somewhat important. Most of my patients, 99% of them, don't even want to do those anymore.

[Alex Clark]

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[Dr. Bob Sears]

All those patients that I see that don't vaccinate, I bring them in about two or three times in the first year of their life for a wellness checkup. When they're born, when they're maybe two months old, and when they're about six to nine months old. And then I might see them when they're 2 and 4 and 6 years old. I'll see them several times throughout the young childhood. I do find that very valuable. And as a pediatrician, raising all these natural kids, you know, these kids are being raised completely natural, you know, in every aspect of their life. They're so healthy, they never come in sick. When they are sick, it's very minor.

[Alex Clark]

You don't have a bunch of kids that are, like, jacked up on raw milk and listeria and all that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, no. There. I do have a lot of raw milk drinkers, and they're doing great. They're doing okay. Yeah. Yeah. Parents ask me, are checkups necessary? And a lot of parents are worried that child protective services is going to come after them if they don't do checkups.

[Alex Clark]

Right. Like, do they need to have a record?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. Yeah. So I literally will have parents come in and say, I really don't think I need to be here. But, yeah, I just need a paper trail showing that I've been a good parent and come into the doctor every now and then. So I do have some parents that. That do it for that reason. But as a pediatrician, I occasionally find something that's a health concern with a child that the parents wouldn't have known about. What's the most common say they're not growing well enough. They're a little shorter than they typically should be, or maybe their nutrition isn't great, or they might have intestinal problems that I need to kind of help them solve, whether they're constipated or have a lot of food allergies or a lot of food allergies, giving them unhealthy intestinal symptoms. And. But I think as a pediatrician, what I love about my job Most is, yeah, 99% of those kids that come through are perfectly healthy.

[Alex Clark]

Do you have friends who are just like. This is probably not the exact medical term, but like normal pediatricians, and you compare notes about, like, your patients and what they deal with on their patients and. And who has sicker patients, you know, the typical vaccinated ones versus the unvaccinated ones.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, I do have some of those pediatricians that I used to be friends with. But, you know what I like to do is I like to compare my practice from when I first started because I was one of those pediatricians that gave infants a number of vaccines.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, yeah, your own numbers. Okay, so tell us about that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, yeah. So my own numbers from the first 10 years of my practice were that I used to give patients some of the most important vaccines. Vaccines against whooping cough and meningitis, sometimes measles, pneumonia. Vaccines. I used to give vaccines against some of the worst diseases for babies. And I had a lot of. I would say probably 3/4 of my patients used to do those vaccines. This was back in the late 90s and the early 2000s. And I did have an office full of sick kids. Like, the end of every day, I'd see between five and 10 kids with ear infections, sinus infections, tonsil infections, fevers. I used to dread the end of every day because it was really draining on spending six hours doing a bunch of checkups, and then you have a waiting room full of 10 sick kids to see at the end of the day. Now I sit around and kind of twiddle my thumbs at the end of every day.

[Alex Clark]

No way.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And be happy that I get to leave an hour early because maybe one kid shows up because they have a fever or their ear hurts or something, and I still have just as many patients. But kids are not getting sick like they used to.

[Alex Clark]

And at least your patients.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

At least my patients. But research has shown that to be true, though. Anyone who's published a study that has compared the frequency of illnesses and allergies and learning disorders and a bunch of different chronic illnesses in kids who vaccinate compared to kids who don't vaccinate. There's this strange mystery that the kids who are raised completely naturally have a much lower rate of all of these common childhood illnesses and conditions. Much, much lower. I mean, I've never examined that scientifically in my office. So I don't know it's true. But I do know it's true that 25 years ago, when I started, my practice was one way, and now it's a completely different way. And I suspect that it's because a naturally raised immune system is going to be a healthier immune system that works better and fights off illness even better. So that when you are exposed to all these common childhood colds and flu and Covid and all these things that kids catch every year, their immune systems are designed to handle them, and they do. And they don't have the ear infection complications and the pneumonia and sinus infections and tonsil infections nearly as much. I can't say for sure scientifically, it's true in my patients until I actually produce data on that and analyze it. But other doctors that have done that.

[Alex Clark]

They see the same.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, that's what it shows. And just my own sort of unscientific observation is that it does seem to be true.

[Alex Clark]

Is it accurate to say that medical students today are being told that vaccines are 100% necessary and also 100% harmless?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

And does the science prove that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No.

[Alex Clark]

How can they teach that in medical school?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

In medical school, I actually learned almost nothing about vaccines. We learned very, very little. I'm not even sure what they teach people today in medical school about vaccines. I know 25, 28 years ago when I went to Georgetown, we had about as much vaccine lectures as we did nutrition.

[Alex Clark]

I knew you were going to say nutrition. How many days in your entire med school career did you spend on food?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, we probably spend a half of an afternoon.

[Alex Clark]

That's it. This is just mind blowing to me. And then, and then when it comes to like pharmaceutical drugs, how much of your med school career do you think you spent on that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, we have a year long course called pharmacology.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

We learn everything about medicine, everything about drugs.

[Alex Clark]

This. This is the corruption. This is the corruption that makes absolutely no sense.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, yeah, and it's interesting as a pediatrician and. Or not, not me specifically, but every other pediatrician out there who has a fully vaccinating practice, that's what they spend most of their career doing as a pediatrician. You would think during medical school and then during their pediatric residency, they would get extensive training in the single most complicated and invasive part of their career.

[Alex Clark]

So why don't they? Because they know if they start getting into the weeds that they're not, then the doctor's gonna be like, wait a minute, this isn't adding up. This doesn't seem that safe or effective.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, I think that that may be true, but I think medical schools and pediatric training centers truly believe that vaccines are so safe there's no reason to talk about risk and they're so effective that everyone has to do them. So essentially there's not even anything to talk about. So we don't even have to really train you to talk about it. Because everyone should just do it anyway.

[Alex Clark]

Are some of these pharmaceutical or vaccine companies also funding some of these medical schools?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, yes, they're funding probably all of these medical schools.

[Alex Clark]

So then wouldn't it be fair to infer that maybe they're not spending a lot of coursework on the efficacy of these vaccines because they're getting paid by the vaccine, so they want to rush doctors through it?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I would like to believe they really do truly believe they are 100% safe and 100% necessary for everybody. I like to think it's an altruistic reason, not a financial reason. I don't know whether or not I'm right about that, but I think most pediatricians don't go into pediatrics for the money. It's probably one of the lowest paying medical careers that you can have. They go into it to help kids. But when they're taught that vaccines help kids and they make them healthier and no one's injured by them, they just grow up learning that they have no reason to believe otherwise. I remember as a student at Georgetown, one of the professors told us something really interesting. The tuition we paid to go to medical school, 22,000 a year, that covers about 2% of the medical school's budget. The other 98% comes from donations and investments from private equity from all the. Just the big funds that the medical schools have. But also it comes from pharmaceutical companies.

[Alex Clark]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so you're right. I always felt like it was our tuition that's covering the cost of medical school. No, we're covering a tiny little fraction. A lot of it comes from pharmaceutical companies. And so you have to ask, is that influencing what we are learning?

[Alex Clark]

Can you share the research that proves the CDC schedule is safe?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, I can't because they haven't done that research. Now, any doctor who's listening to this is going to be shouting into their, you know, their, their, you know, earbuds or something, or listen to the car stereo. Of course they've done the research. Any doctor would tell you, of course the CDC has done the research. They've done extensive research. I would say no, they haven't, because I haven't been able to find that research.

[Alex Clark]

You haven't been able to find any research from the CDC proving that vaccines are. The vaccine schedule currently is safe?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Absolutely. And not just me. The Institute of medicine, about 12 years ago, 10 years ago, somewhere around there. This is a group of doctors that are academics that love vaccines and they love the vaccine schedule. They embarked on an effort to find that research and show the world that research that proves that the CDC schedule of vaccines is safe. And their findings were that we can't find the research.

[Alex Clark]

You are kidding.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I'm not kidding. And because in order to find research that that proves it's safe, you would have to take about 100,000 kids on a CDC schedule and compare them to 100,000 kids who are not getting vaccines. You'd have to have a randomized placebo controlled study and say you don't need that many kids, say you only need 10,000 kids in each group, or 5,000 kids, you need a placebo group in order to prove that something is safe for the long term. And they haven't done that. So that's why the Institute of Medicine said we can't find the research.

[Alex Clark]

Would it be fair to say, well, even if they did that study, you could never say that it was 100% because these kids were vaccinated or they weren't, that they were healthy or unhealthy because you have all of these variables about environment, the food that they eat, you know, emotional upbringing and the relationships they have in their family. Like all these different factors could that impact health?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It would be really difficult, yes. To blindly assign families to an unvaccinated and a vaccinated group. And that's one reason why the CDC won't do that research is they feel like you can't ethically do a blinded placebo controlled study.

[Alex Clark]

I mean, like would. The way to do it would be you get that amount of families to sign up and say, we're going to meal, we're going to send you meals, so everyone's eating the same thing. We're going to make sure you guys all have the same, like family dynamic, you know, like two parent home. Could you like control it in that way or still it would not be totally.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No. Absolutely no. You could totally control for all those variables.

[Alex Clark]

But it would so expensive and very hard.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It would be very difficult. But no, you could, you could find say 100,000 families that are very organic, naturally living, and they want to raise their kids, you know, as naturally as they can. But find half of those that do like vaccines and want to vaccinate their kids, and you find half of those that voluntarily don't want to vaccinate their kids and you could compare their health outcomes. It would be expensive, but I feel like it would be a critical piece of the puzzle that's missing.

[Alex Clark]

Like schools who require your kids to be vaccinated for them to attend school there, all that kind of stuff. Is based on a schedule that nobody can prove is actually safe.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. What they've proven when they say it's safe and effective is that essentially the FDA has declared a certain vaccine safe enough to use in the general public and that the number of people that might have a bad reaction is small enough that it's acceptable, just like any medication. So when the FDA says vaccines are safe, they don't mean 100% safe. They just mean safe enough as a pharmaceutical to make it a viable product. And they research every vaccine by itself to make sure it's safe, safe in quotes. And then they add it to the other vaccines and they mix it with the other vaccines to make sure it seems safe. And they tabulate all the bad reactions and make sure nothing surprising comes out or that not too many people have bad reactions and they declare it safe. But safe for most people doesn't mean safe for everybody. And so that's what you have to understand when the CDC keeps saying vaccines are safe and effective. That's what they're basing it on, FDA approval level of safety. And I think a lot of people have come to realize over the last four years what FDA approval really means.

[Alex Clark]

And what does it really mean?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, during the pandemic, everyone sort of had a front row seat to watch how pharma creates a vaccine and how the FDA approves of vaccine, vaccine and then how the CDC recommends a vaccine. Everyone watched how they went through the production, the development of COVID vaccine, how it was frost tracked and approved. And about half of our country decided, hey, that looks a little fishy. It doesn't look very thorough. Looks like they're rushing it. And it looks like a lot of people are being paid off to approve it. And people were questioning the whole process of COVID vaccine manufacturer and approval.

[Alex Clark]

And is the reality that basically every vaccine on the market, it goes through that same situation. It was just that we had a front row seat, you're saying, to the COVID one. So we finally noticed, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Everyone kind of assumed all the vaccines we've been using all these years were completely safe and had much better safety research than the COVID vaccine. But that is not actually true. The vaccines we've been using for 20, 30, 40 years, their initial research all those years ago was not much different than the safety research that the COVID vaccine went through. And once it's approved by the fda, they don't do a lot more safety research on it. Once it's on the schedule, they just use it and move forward with it. And Declare it safe. And so a lot of people both have opened their eyes to that idea that they're questioning the COVID vaccine, maybe they're questioning a few other vaccines. Now a lot of parents are now starting to question all vaccines because the pandemic has caused a lot of people to not trust pharma as much, but not trust the CDC or the FDA as much and not trust our medical policymakers as much.

[Alex Clark]

And is it true, is it true that the FDA is allowed to take money from the drug companies on who is making the drugs they have to decide to approve or not?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's kind of true. People who sit on the FDA approval committees who regulate the approval of vaccines, these are researchers and doctors who have been paid by pharma in the past to do their research. They've gotten grants from pharma. Pharma has supported the research for many, many years. They work maybe at an academic institution and have gotten, you know, millions of dollars from pharma to fund their research.

[Alex Clark]

And so is that ethical for those people to be making those decisions, in your opinion?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, that's a great question, because these people aren't being paid directly while they're at the fda, but their research is being paid and the research was paid prior to being at the fda. But where I think it becomes a very unethical area is a lot of these people once they leave the fda. And the same thing is true for the CDC people. You get, you know, you could say all the same things about people that do research and approve vaccines at the CDC once they leave the FDA and the CDC and go out to the private world to get jobs in medicine. Where do you think they're getting jobs? They're getting offered very lucrative positions with pharmaceutical companies if they played ball along the way.

[Alex Clark]

So that becomes like a trade secret that people who are on those advisory boards for the FDA are like, hey man, you play your cards right, like you, you, you wrap up here and you're gonna get like the cushiest, you know, most amazing paying job ever with Pfizer or whatever, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And that actually happened. A doctor who was in charge of the vaccine safety division at the CDC for many years for like an eight year period. It that doctor, when she left the cdc, she became the head, I'm pretty sure it was Pfizer. And if it wasn't Pfizer, as one of the other very large vaccine manufacturing companies, she became the head of their vaccine division to do ongoing vaccine development research. That's where there's an ethical problem People aren't paid like directly millions of dollars at the time while they're in these government institutions, but they do get a lot of money before, they get a lot of money after. So there's definitely a financial incentive for these institutions to protect the vaccine policy and protect the CDC vaccine schedule.

[Alex Clark]

How many vaccines in one day are we giving children today?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

When you were 2 months old, you were getting nine vaccines at 2 months, 4 months and 6 months.

[Alex Clark]

Why that many at one time?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That is an awesome question. And I don't know, I mean, some of these are diseases that babies don't even get exposed to, like hepatitis B vaccine. You know, that's a sexually transmitted infection. Why give babies a vaccine? I mean, maybe give teenagers that vaccine, you know, if they decide to make bad life choices, I guess. But other vaccines, we give babies, like polio vaccine. We don't have polio anymore.

[Alex Clark]

But people would say, yeah, we don't have polio anymore because we have the vaccine.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And they use that tone of voice when they say it. Right.

[Alex Clark]

And so what do you say?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you could argue that that's like an hour long discussion in and of itself. You know, did the polio vaccine help us get rid of polio?

[Alex Clark]

I thought the polio vaccine made us all crippled.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, that's interesting you say that because it did do that. Very sadly to about nine American babies every year were getting crippled by the polio vaccine that we used in the 80s and 90s. So since by then we had gotten rid of polio as a disease, we stopped using that vaccine that used to cripple nine kids a year, and we switched it over to another vaccine that doesn't have that side effect, but it also doesn't prevent the spread of the disease anymore.

[Alex Clark]

The polio vaccine doesn't prevent the spread of polio.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

The one we use today no longer prevents.

[Alex Clark]

So then what is the point of it?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Because if polio ever re enters our country, each individual is vaccinated will have some immunity from getting a paralytic case of the disease. But we haven't had polio enter our country in 40 years. Wow. So that isn't a risk. So you could go through each one of those nine vaccines and decide, hey, does my kid really need a Hep B vaccine vaccine? Does my kid really need a polio. No.

[Alex Clark]

So what I'm thinking is, I'm assuming surely if the CDC is saying, hey, these nine vaccines, you can do it all in one go, that means they figured out that they're all good. To, like, interact with each other. Right. It's all safe to, like, mix and match. You know, put them all in a mixing bowl, put it in your arm like is. So is that true or no?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

The FDA has said that when you mix a new vaccine with the eight other vaccines we're already giving a baby, the baby doesn't seem to have any higher risk of side effects. That's a problem. They really should be testing these vaccines for safety against inactive placebos. You develop a new vaccine, say, for example, we developed a pneumonia vaccine maybe something like 18 years ago. And instead of doing placebo safety studies comparing how babies reacted to that vaccine compared to not getting any vaccines at all, all they did is they added that new pneumonia vaccine to the eight other vaccines and compared the side effects to babies getting the eight other vaccines. And, you know, most of them did okay. Some of them had, you know, fevers and seizures, some of them had, you know, minor nerve problems. But you're not comparing apples to apples.

[Alex Clark]

When a new parent takes their baby to the pediatrician's office, what questions should they ask about each shot in the schedule?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, if you're just now beginning to explore this issue, at that moment with your pediatrician, say at your two month checkup when those nine shots are due, that's not the time to start investigating this. You should have been reading about this months ago during pregnancy or even before you have kids. It takes takes many months to learn about each vaccine. So if you don't do any of your homework and you take your two month old baby in for your checkup and you ask your doctor, well, tell me about each of these nine vaccines. I want to know all the details. It would take your doctor four hours to explain all that and no doctor has that time. You know, I almost put the responsibility on parents to do the homework before you ever even have that checkup because a doctor doesn't have four hours to spend with you. And so that's. I think that my biggest passion for parents is I like reaching parents during pregnancy when their babies are young or before their babies are born, get them thinking about this. You do your homework, you read about each vaccine and what the disease is and what the vaccine saw side effects are. You develop an idea in your mind the pros and cons of each of these vaccines. You kind of come to a decision of what you think you might want to do or not do. You talk to your friends about it, you get educated about it. Then you sit with your doctor and you tell your doctor, you know, what I don't think I want to do the entire CDC schedule of vaccines. I'm not comfortable doing all of them. I might want to do some of them. Let's talk about it. And you schedule extra time with your doctor. Schedule like a double checkup time because no doctor has, you know they can't sit with you for another hour to have that discussion. So schedule it ahead of time. But honestly, nowadays doctors aren't going to keep you as a patient if you don't comply. If you're questioning vaccines that way, you have to find an office that's open to the discussion. Us.

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[Dr. Bob Sears]

And I think that's what every parent is worried about. You know, they hear that vaccines might be related to autism and they know autism is on the rise. You know, it has skyrocketed since the late 80s. Unfortunately, we don't have enough research, in my opinion, to make a very clear, concise scientific statement one way or the other. I don't think we can say vaccines do cause autism, but I don't think we can say vaccines don't cause autism. I think it's still up in the air because we haven't done the right kind of research. You would literally have to take thousands of unvaccinated babies in a research study, compare them to thousands of vaccinated babies, and look at the rates of autism.

[Alex Clark]

Do you have patients in your clinic who have autism that were not vaccinated as babies?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I do. I've seen some mild cases of autism in fully unvaccinated children. It's my opinion and a lot of people's opinion that autism is very directly related to environmental toxins.

[Alex Clark]

If these babies have autism in your clinic that were not vaccinated, is there any other things that are in common between the mothers? Like they both ate, like really horribly during pregnancy or had mold exposure. Is there anything that you found that connects them?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Research has been pretty clear in showing that environmental toxins affect autism risk, nutrition affects autism risk. So when it comes to vaccines, vaccines have toxins in them, they have chemicals in them. They are not a benign, harmless, chemical free product. And so in order to save, you know, all these other chemicals can contribute to autism, but vaccine chemicals can't contribute to autism. You can't say that scientifically until you do a research project that actually proves it. All the studies they've done in mainstream medicine have failed to show a relationship between vaccines and autism. They haven't proven there is no relationship. They've essentially failed to show that there is a relationship. It's kind of a little scientific nuance that allows them to then say, well, we've proven vaccines don't cause autism. You know, the scientific terminology is we've shown no relationship between vaccines and autism. But what the media say is that we've proven vaccines don't cause autism.

[Alex Clark]

Right.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so parents don't have to worry. So that's kind of the media mainstream message that people hear. But in the families that have been affected by autism, and families who have seen their children have a severe vaccine reaction the night they had vaccines, and the next day their kids suddenly showing all these symptoms of autism, Autism. You try to tell one of those parents that vaccines are not related, they'll never believe you.

[Alex Clark]

Right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so because science isn't holding the hands of these families and saying, we hear you, we know this is happening to thousands of kids in our country, you know, every year the rates of autism are increasing. Every year we're going to get to the bottom of that. The mainstream medical scientific community says, well, it can't be vaccines, it's got to be something else. And we're going to try to figure out what it is. But I Think parents today, back to your original question is what are parents to do? Science says, no, it's not vaccines. But so many families are saying, yes, it is vaccines that cause my child to have the sudden onset of autism. In my office, I've seen kids develop very severe neurological reactions the night they got vaccines. And then in the weeks to come, they show all these symptoms of autism. I've seen it in my office and when I've seen it in a child who's not had vaccines, it's mild and subtle. We don't realize the child has autism until they're two or three years old. And I see these minor delays and they never even had a vaccine. So in my opinion, I tell parents that I can't tell you whether or not vaccines are related or, you know, to autism. And most of my parents in my office, I feel like they're making the decision to not vaccinate not so much to prevent autism in their minds, but just to raise their kid naturally.

[Alex Clark]

What are the signs that your child may be having a negative reaction to a vaccine?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, it's different at different ages. I think if you're going to vaccinate young babies at that two month visit when vaccines are recommended, I think the most significant side effect that I see, that's kind of a red flag that future reactions could be harmful to your baby, is what I call encephalitis. Encephalitis is where you have three or more hours of nonstop inconsolable crying, possibly fever, the night that you got vaccines. So you get your nine vaccines in the office. It's probably grouped together into two or three different injections and you swallow one of the vaccines by mouth. But it comes out to about nine vaccines. And that night your baby starts screaming inconsolably for three or more hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. When that's happening, it's encephalitis. Your brain is literally swelling and is inflamed and it causes minor brain injury. And that happens to a minority of babies. It could be one in a thousand babies is what the CDC used to tell. I think it might be a little more often than that, but when that happens, that's probably the most important severe reaction to look out for in a baby. If that happens to your baby with a vaccine, I'd strongly suggest you talk to your doctor about future doses and talk to a doctor who is willing to have the conversation with you. Now, as you get older, we don't see the older kids have this encephalitis type of reaction. It might happen when you're a one year old, one and a half enough, but once you're two, three, four and older, we don't typically see it. We typically will see febrile seizures or we'll see intestinal allergic reactions. Like someone who had a really healthy gut growing up suddenly has really chronic diarrhea, or they develop eczema or allergies, or we start to see them get a lot of ear infections. Their immune system seems to be. Be hampered by this vaccine overload that why are dealing with.

[Alex Clark]

Why might an unvaccinated child get a ton of ear infections over and over?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I don't know that I've seen a lot of ear infections in an unvaccinated child. And I'm trying to think. I mean, I, I do occasionally see an ear infection in unvaccinated kids. I mean, of course it happens. It's, it's not common.

[Alex Clark]

Maybe it's environmental, if that's happening.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, well, I mean, when, when you get sick and your sinuses are all congested, your ears, you know, sometimes will get congested. And if you have an unhealthy immune system, then you will move on to an ear infection. And if you have a healthy immune system that knows how to handle illnesses, you usually won't.

[Alex Clark]

Out of all of the vaccines that are recommended on this schedule, are there some that you're like, okay, these are absolutely basically worthless. But these, there's, there is a good argument to possibly consider them.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And this is the advice I used to give a lot of patients. And so, you know, I don't know that I would say absolutely worthless, but I would maybe use the terminology. Which vaccines are less important? Sure, right. I would say, you know, hepatitis B, of course, for babies, maybe polio vaccine for babies now that we don't have the disease and the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission or help herd immunity? I would say a rotavirus vaccine is something we give babies that's a vomiting and diarrhea illness that's pretty harmless to most people. I think hepatitis A vaccine is a food poisoning illness that is pretty harmless to most kids who catch it. I might put chickenpox vaccine on the list of less important vaccines. I might put flu vaccine, COVID vaccine. These are all illnesses that when a baby catches these illnesses, they're going to be mild in most cases, or these are illnesses that don't exist in babies or been eradicated. So that's probably my list of less important vaccines. If you look on the other end of the Spectrum what vaccines could be looked at as more important based on disease severity. If you have a really terrible disease, you don't want your baby to catch that disease. You might vaccinate against it. Well, so what are the really bad infections? There's meningitis, there is pneumonia, sometimes can be pretty bad. Measles sometimes can be more severe. But in most cases, it's just a routine illness that most people get through.

[Alex Clark]

Is that even a thing anymore?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It is. We still see measles here and there in small outbreaks. Mumps isn't that much fun, but in most cases, the mumps are also pretty, pretty harmless. Whooping cough can be bad for a baby, but it's not bad for an older child. Tetanus is bad no matter what age you are. There's a teenage meningitis vaccine we give. So it's mainly the meningitis Illnesses can be bad. Whooping cough sometimes can be bad.

[Alex Clark]

I say tetanus can be bad. But then earlier I thought you said tetanus was pretty much like, like not even a thing in America anymore.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, it's extremely rare.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Extremely rare. We have about one young child in the whole country every year that comes down with tetanus.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, my.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

One, one. And then if you include all the teenagers running around, you have about five. So the way I like parents to look at it, you have some diseases that are really bad. You have some diseases that are mostly harmless, you have some diseases that are common, some diseases that are rare and have been eradicated. Here's the good news and why a lot of my patients choose not to vaccinate. All the diseases that are very severe are thankfully extremely rare, like meningitis, like tetanus. There's no such thing as a severe and common infection.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, right.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So, yeah, I mean, if you had a terribly severe infection, say one of these meningitis diseases was very, very common, and it was killing people left and right. Well, you could argue, well, that's a very important vaccine. I'd probably want to give my baby that vaccine. If there was a very, very common form of meningitis, thank God there isn't. All the meningitises are very rare. So I feel like that's why a lot of my patients feel the freedom to raise a baby without vaccines, because all the common illnesses they're going to catch, they're going to get through. And are they going to ever come across one of those severe infections? Probably not. So they. So once they realize that that's kind of like a. A breath of fresh air from them. They can relax and feel, well, maybe I can follow my gut and raise my baby naturally, like my mom. Instinct is telling me to do.

[Alex Clark]

What is the great aluminum debate?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Aluminum was one of the first things that got me interested in vaccines.

[Alex Clark]

Why?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Because it's fascinating. And I remember I used to tell my patients, don't worry about aluminum. Aluminum is harmless. Because back then, we had mercury in vaccines. In the late 90s, it was all about mercury. So I was like, yeah, mercury. Let's spend all day talking about that. Aluminum, that's a minor metal. It's not even a heavy metal. And so we don't have to worry about aluminum. And then one day, a patient, after I gave a talk in which I said that, a patient came up to me and said, you know what? How much have you actually looked into aluminum now that mercury is gone? What have you studied? And I'd done a little bit of research, but not that much. When I started to look into aluminum, I was floored, really floored about the effects that aluminum can have on a developing child's brain.

[Alex Clark]

Like what?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, aluminum is a neurotoxin toxin. Okay? We now know that. We know it's toxic to the brain. It kills brain cells, and it harms immune systems. And that's why people have been talking about getting aluminum out of deodorants and aluminum out of cosmetics. And that's why we limit aluminum in medications, we limited in water and foods. Everyone's monitoring aluminum because everyone in general, a little bit of aluminum from our environment every day. All right? But everything we ingest comes right out of our body into the toilet. Right. Our bodies are really good at not absorbing aluminum out of the gut. When you inject aluminum, you don't have that protective. It goes straight into your body.

[Alex Clark]

Ooh.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so when you look at the amount of aluminum that are in vaccine vaccines, it is a very small amount when you compare it to the amount that you ingest. And the scientific community says you don't have to worry about aluminum and vaccines because it's such a tiny little bit. What they don't tell you is all of it's going into you. All right? You don't have detox mechanisms to get it out of your body. So 100% of a small amount going into you over and over again. About half the vaccines we give babies have aluminum. Half of them do, half of them don't. And so when you're giving that to babies over and over again, the levels build up, and you actually exceed the FDA's safety limit that's prescribed for medications or IV infusions, other injectable medications, everything that you can inject in a hospital, in a hospital setting with a hospitalized patient, the FDA has actually put aluminum limits on those, but not vaccines. When you're getting injected with the vaccines, it's by far exceeding the amount that the FDA will let a hospitalized patient get simply because they think vaccines are so important that you have to accept this little bit of toxicity. And that's just how it is. And then instead of telling people that, they just tell you, don't worry about it at all. It's totally safe. There's nothing to see here. Move on. But anyone who researches aluminum like I did, and I've written whole chapters on this topic, there's aluminum information, and I think every book about vaccines that I've written, because I think aluminum is the new mercury.

[Alex Clark]

Would you even avoid cooking things in the oven on or with aluminum?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You want to live your life as aluminum free as you can.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Anything you ingest, thankfully, almost all of it passes out of your body.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You want to be careful with what you inject.

[Alex Clark]

Got it. When it comes to aluminum ingest versus inject.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right.

[Alex Clark]

You believe that there's some nuance to the use of formaldehyde in vaccines? Like, there's a little bit of a gray area here that parents should know. Could you tell us about that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That, yeah, formaldehyde is a good example of something that we know is very toxic to the body, yet they put it in several vaccines that we give babies. And it's not just formaldehyde. I mean, there are several dozen chemicals that if you get the entire vaccine schedule you are getting, it's at least several dozen chemicals that are either neurotoxic or immune, toxic, endocrine disruptors, or even carcinogens that are injected into your body in vaccines. And the medical community and the FDA feels like this is all okay because the quantity is so tiny. I hope they're right, and I worry that they might not be right about each one of those several dozen chemicals.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

How can they be right if they haven't actually researched it? And that's probably the biggest problem. Formaldehyde, aluminum, everything else. They haven't done the safety research to prove that these chemicals are safe to inject into human babies.

[Alex Clark]

When it comes to ingredients, which vaccine for children do you think has the most toxic list?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I would say the most toxic list is probably the DTAP vaccine.

[Alex Clark]

And you say that the DTAP vaccine can be really complicated for Parents. Parents. Why?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. Well, it protects against diphtheria and tetanus and whooping cough. All right. We don't have diphtheria anymore in our country. Haven't had for a long time, so people don't even need that vaccine, but it's just automatically mixed in there. Tetanus is a disease that almost never occurs in young children, so you don't really need that vaccine. But whooping cough is a disease that does happen in young babies. And when a newborn baby catches whooping, coughing can be very severe. And when children catch whooping cough, it's a very inconvenient disease. You cough for one, two, three months. It's not fun to catch whooping cough, but older kids aren't harmed by it. They're just inconvenienced by it. But it's very severe, potentially harmful for newborns. So you have this vaccine that could potentially protect newborns from the severity of whooping cough. Yet it's one of the vaccines that can cause encephalitis for babies that hours and hours of nonstop screaming and fever that causes minor brain injury in babies. The DTaP vaccine is known to have a risk of that. And the DTAP vaccine has a lot of different chemicals in it. And. And the DTaP vaccine is a little controversial because the older version that they first made of this vaccine was extremely dangerous. Why they ended up taking it off the market because it was causing severe encephalitis.

[Alex Clark]

And when was that happening?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

This was the 70s and the 80s.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, so gen X would have been the last generation to get that vaccine.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, yes. The original dtap, or we called it DTP vaccine back then, and it was causing severe brain injury. And they kept giving it. The government kept denying it. And so many kids were injured by that vaccine. They eventually had to take it off the market. But what kind of pisses me off is they didn't take it off the market until they had a newer version they could replace it with. So they realized it was dangerous. In the late 80s, they admitted it. They published all kinds of research showing it was dangerous, but they kept giving it to babies for many years until they could develop the dtap version that we have today. It's less reactive, it causes less severe encephalitis, but it still can trigger it. And so I worry that giving babies that vaccine, even though that might be a somewhat important vaccine, there is some neurological risk to it. And so that's kind of what every parent has to understand. You look at the disease, you look at Your baby's personal risk of that infection. And then you look at the vaccine, what the ingredients are and what the side effects are, and you make an individual decision for each of these vaccines.

[Alex Clark]

Is that the biggest mistake you believe has been made in vaccine policy?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Wow. I've actually never thought of that because there have been a lot of mistakes. Prior to the DTP causing brain injury, one of the old mumps vaccines actually caused meningitis in many, many, many kids. They had to take it off the market. One of the rotavirus vaccines we gave in the late 90s or early 2000s caused severe intestinal blockage in babies and was causing fatal intestinal reactions in babies. The mercury in vaccines was a huge mistake. People have looked at MMR vaccine, giving a live, triple, triple live virus vaccine, the MMR vaccine, and when we see some of the babies that get that vaccine have neurological reactions, and they've actually published research on the MMR vaccine causing severe cases of encephalitis, which is very severe brain injury in babies in very rare circumstances. So you could look at a number of these mistakes over the years. I don't know if anyone stands out, but that's sort of the take home message is it doesn't even matter if, if one is worse than the others. Every so often, something comes up where we realize the vaccine is triggering harm. They rarely take it off the market. They leave it there till they can come up with a replacement or they deny that the harm is there.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, I never knew they did that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Because they're so worried that parents are going to step away from vaccinating and they're worried what might happen.

[Alex Clark]

That sounds like a culture.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's interesting you say that because people who criticize the mainstream vaccine policy, like people that walk in my shoes and work in my world, who are critical of vaccine policy, we actually say it almost seems like a religion to them and that nothing can possibly be wrong with it. We don't even have to scientifically prove it all because we just know it's right. And we almost have faith that the vaccine system is so good for people. We're not going to do any research that compares how our vaccinated kids are doing to everyone else just because we know it's the truth. The reason why you might refer to it as a cult is what happens to people that question it? What happens to people that want to leave that program or that process? They're ostracized and they are ridiculed. And a lot of people in my world, Eve, would Mention Bobby Kennedy, for example. He and many others have offered to do live debates with some of the most intelligent, smartest, academic vaccine supporters there are, people whose whole medical career has been based around vaccines. They want to do live debates and debate these science scientists. And no one will take him up on it.

[Alex Clark]

No one has.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No one will do a live debate because they know as good as they think vaccines are and as safe as they think they are, they know they don't have that scientific research proving the outcomes of their vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated ones. They know they don't have the science and that there's a lot of ethical problems with the whole pharmaceutical industry. So they're not willing to stand up and defend it. And they have this real religious fervor that comes out whenever someone does try to criticize them, but they can't scientifically argue against it. So they do it more so in the media, more so in a religious way.

[Alex Clark]

Is it a right wing conspiracy theory that there's aborted baby parts in vaccines?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Not anymore. Really, because we know it's true. It's funny. One of the most prominent vaccine supporters who works at a children's hospital, who's created educational videos, you can find it, I'm pretty sure you can still find it on the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, I believe. Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. He has come out and said, yes, there are components from aborted fetal tissues in vaccines. It's very little, but yes, it is there. So what I've seen happen is what we know are in vaccines are DNA fragments from the genes from the genetic codes of aborted babies that were used to make vaccines. And we know some of the protein fragments from, from these fetus cells were in vaccines many years ago. When they first were developing vaccines, they needed fetal tissues to feed the vaccine germs. They found that creating fetal tissue cell cultures was the best way to nourish measles viruses, chickenpox viruses, polio viruses, hepatitis viruses. All these viruses thrive when you grow them on fetal tissues. And so the industry allowed it to happen. And then when they take all the viruses out of the cultures of fetal cells, they try to filter out all the fetal cell components, but they can't. Some of the DNA and proteins make it through into the final vaccine solution. And so we know it's there and we don't know what effects it might have on people. It could be harmless, it could cause some autoimmune concerns in people because it's, you know, other human tissues that's being injected into you.

[Alex Clark]

So is that the same case for animal products being allowed in vaccines on the ingredients?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, animal products are probably safer because they're different.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, that's interesting. I would think, okay, human, human, you know, maybe that would be better, but actually because you're a different species, it may not affect you as much.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. When you inject the same species proteins in DNA, we worry a lot more about autoimmunity and autoim in reactions compared to animal products.

[Alex Clark]

Does spreading out shots decrease reactions?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It probably does. In my practice when I used to vaccinate babies, I did spread them out somewhat. And when I have to vaccinate older children for school nowadays in California, where I work, most of my patients homeschool and they don't vaccinate. But some do vaccinate their older kids. We spread them out. I'll put like three or four months between vaccine doses and I do feel like people handle it a lot better. I still have seen some people have bad vaccine reactions even when we just give them one vaccine, even maybe their first vaccine. I've seen a few people have a bad vaccine reaction. So there's no guarantee that spreading them out is going to be safer. But I say it definitely is safer than grouping them together, you know, doing, you know, many in the same day and following those two month intervals that are prescribed for vaccines. If you can get longer intervals between your vaccine doses, it probably is safer.

[Alex Clark]

Is SIDS just an adverse vaccine reaction?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That is a great question. That's a very hot topic.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, it is, it is.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Because tragically, there have been many cases of SIDS that have occurred the night that a baby's vaccinated. But it's hard to say because some cases of SIDS occur two weeks after vaccination. Some babies pass away of SIDS six weeks after they've had vaccines. So how do we know?

[Alex Clark]

Right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I mean, you'd have to include that factor in a very large study.

[Alex Clark]

Got it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And until we do that, you can't say it does or it doesn't. There are many things we know about SIDS that are contributing factors. We know that sleeping on your back may reduce the risk, the risk of sids. We know for sure if you're a smoker that dramatically raises the risk of.

[Alex Clark]

SIDS because of stuff that's happening in utero or them being around it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's a lot of factors. The chemicals that go through the baby go through into the baby in utero. The chemicals in the second hand smoke. If you are a smoker, you're actually recommended to never sleep in the same room as your baby because the second hand smoke emanating from you, we don't want that in the baby while baby sleep. It's very, very interesting, we know. But on the other hand, sleeping in the same room as your baby reduces the risk of SIDS if you're a non smoker. So keeping that baby at least in your room with you for the first year of life is actually a common recommendation nowadays. Days breastfeeding is protective against sids. So there's a lot of things you can do that reduces the risk of sids. And what role vaccines play in this is just really hard to say.

[Alex Clark]

If you and your wife were having a baby today, how many of the 70 to 85 recommended shots that they're doing now do you think you and your wife would choose for your baby?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

A lot of parents, a lot of patients in the office ask me that. They want to know, forget all the information, just tell me what you would do and I tell them, well this is very hypothetical because I know it's not going to happen. So I'm not ever going to be in this situation. But I could definitely see myself raising a baby vaccine free today if I was ever in that situation, which I'm not. So who knows. But yeah, I mean that's what 99% of my patients do. Since I've never seen a child severely harmed by an infection and I've seen a lot of people have severe vaccine reactions, I feel like I would probably be one of those 99% that raises a baby vaccine free.

[Alex Clark]

How can parents be sure to raise anti pharma kids in a very big pharma world?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know what, Trust your instincts, right? In all areas. Whenever I'm talking to parents and ask me a question, I'll say, well what do you think? What is your instinct? Trust your instinct. When it comes to nutrition, lifestyle, you want to limit toxins as best you can, but you want to find a pediatrician who is leaning towards that as well.

[Alex Clark]

How do you know? How do you know?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, there are a lot of us out there, we're basically called integrative pediatrician, pediatricians who are part of, I don't even know what some of the societies might be called, but there are pediatricians out there who have taken a non pharmaceutical approach to medicine and have stepped away from promoting vaccines. Maybe they give vaccines but they don't heavily promote them. They try to limit antibiotics, they try to limit medications for everything, whether it's a reflux bucks and Heartburn to limiting, you know, you know, medications for learning challenges and attention problems. You know, antibiotics is probably the biggest thing that we're trying to limit nowadays. You find a pediatrician that does that and you'll find one who's going to be your partner in raising a kid as pharma free as you possibly can be.

[Alex Clark]

Is there a way to treat ear infection without antibiotics?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, whenever I see an ear infection, I like to try mulen, garlic oil, ear drops. If I'm saying that right. Mulen is an herb and garlic is a very potent antibiotic and it's put into an oil compound that can go into the ears and that garlic infuses into the infected eardrum and can treat the infection. I've seen it do wonders. It's my first line treatment for ear infections.

[Alex Clark]

Is there a way to treat a child's fever without Tylenol?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I love telling my patients, don't give your baby Tylenol.

[Alex Clark]

Why?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

When it comes to fevers, because I think fevers are good for you. Fevers are your body's way of helping to fight the infection. It's a natural response. So I tell my patients to let the fever ride. You can do non medicated approaches, like a lukewarm bath, you know, dabbing their, you know, their, their forehead with, with a cool towel. There are homeopathic fever remedies you can try, but for the most part, you don't even need to try to treat the fever. If your baby is miserable in pain and they're screaming and they're just super miserable from the fever. Yeah. I mean, maybe you want to give them some relief.

[Alex Clark]

Is there a temperature that you would say if you are this high, bring them to the er?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, there's not a number that I tell my patients to look for. It's you're treating the child, not just the number that the fever is. Yeah. If your baby is severely lethargic or shows signs of meningitis, or the back of your neck is stiff and you can't look down or turn your head anywhere, high fever, severe headache, those are severe signs. You want to contact your doctor. If my patients just have irregular fever, 102, 103, and their baby's super miserable, I'll tell them, give them ibuprofen as an alternative to Tylenol. And the ibuprofen I think is safer and I think it does a really good job at giving the baby a break for six hours or so.

[Alex Clark]

What do parents need to know about Tylenol?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, Tylenol, what's interesting is we know when you overdose on Tylenol, it takes all the glutathione out of your body. And glutathione is one of the most important detoxifiers in our body. So we know if you overdo Tylenol, you'll deplete your body's most important detox. So people always say, don't give Tylenol when you're, you know, around vaccines or anytime because you don't want to get rid of your detox mechanisms. We know what happens with high doses of Tylenol or overdoses. The degree to which it happens just with a normal dose of Tylenol is a lot more subtle. It doesn't harm your detox pathways nearly as much. So I think Tylenol might have gotten a little bit of a bad rap based on what we know how overdosing can affect, affect you. But I think people just don't like to take the chance Anyway.

[Alex Clark]

Is this a Tylenol specific thing or also, you'd say the same thing for any acetaminophen.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right? I tell people to avoid acetaminophen, use ibuprofen if you're going to use something Tylenol, you know, I mean, whatever the name brand is, I, I think they're all similar. I, I, I love D Free products. I think D Free is definitely the way to go. I, I always tell people the, like the generic drugstore brands of ibuprofen are made dye free.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, great.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You can find it, you can find it there.

[Alex Clark]

Are you excited for the future of your child patients that California just said they're going to remove food dyes from schools?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I'm very proud of California for that. Yeah, that's the one thing they do.

[Alex Clark]

How can a parent navigate defending their choices to not vaccinate or pick certain vaccines only on the schedule to their family members over the holiday season that might disagree.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, I always tell parents, don't try to defend your decision to other doctors in the doctor's office. You'll just end up having this major argument, you know, arguing the science back and forth. It's probably not worth your time. But family members, you know, it's, that's a tough situation because I've had patients who were uninvited from the family reunion. They're uninvited from visiting the family during Christmas because they just had a baby and they chose not to vaccinate their baby. So someone else in their family just had a baby too, and they're vaccinating and then everyone hears you're not vaccinating, so you get uninvited to Christmas. I think that's a shame. It's very sad when family members believe the CDC's pharma narrative so strongly that they're willing to not allow family members around. I feel like unvaccinated kids are safe and healthy to be around and they don't need to be kicked out of family gatherings. But how do you convince a family member? You know what I feel like what's interesting is research has shown that anybody who starts researching vaccines is unlikely to vaccinate. And so the mainstream medical community doesn't want people to research vaccines because the only good things you're going to find come from the cdc. And people tend to just not trust the CDC as much as they used to. Even that family member that you know that vaccinates their child, you ask them, well, hey, what do you think about the cdc? They go on the cdc, you know, we don't trust them anymore because they're big fire. That family is vaccinating because they trust their individual doctor.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, right. Good point.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. So if you actually turn the conversation into, okay, your doctor recommends vaccines, your doctor's probably great. You know, you always want to listen to your doctor is what people say. But let's look beyond that. And where does that information come from? It comes from the pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines. Then it goes through the FDA that approves vaccines, and then it goes through the cdc. See, let's look at the conflicts of interest in the cdc, the financial interactions between pharma and the cdc. Let's look there. Then let's look at how vaccines have, you know, the schedule has tripled since the late 80s and the early 90s. Do you know what vaccines your babies are getting? You know, the parents might say, yeah, you just got two shots and a sweet little liquid by mouth. My baby only got three vaccines. Vaccines. You'd be like, do you think in.

[Alex Clark]

The next 20 years we'll be up to, potentially, if we're 85 now, a hundred vaccines on the childhood schedule?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, likely, yeah. If they can develop new ones, they will get put on the schedule. So anytime you can get somebody who you are speaking with, if you can get them to simply open their eyes to look beyond their doctor's advice and go more to the source of that advice, they'll start to see some of the things that you've seen, and then you can have a more open conversation.

[Alex Clark]

That's great. That's so Helpful. If you could choose one remedy to heal us at culture, what would it be?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Acceptance of each other's differences. Because that applies to so many different areas of life. It applies to politics, religion, ethnicity, you know, what country you live in. And now it applies to your medical choices as well. Well, because that's the new area where people are finding these huge differences now that more and more people are trying to raise their kids pharma free. The mainstream narrative is now trying to paint that as dangerous and unhealthy and we shouldn't allow these people to do that. Just as they've looked at other issues in the past, they looked at race as an issue hundreds of years ago as something that, that you are worthy of discrimination and economics or what country you're born in. Politics. We love to discriminate against our neighbor based on their politics. But couldn't we all just be like people, human beings? Yeah. If you want to vote Democrat for this election, I'm going to vote Republican. But hey, let's go out and grab coffee and go play tennis together. We don't have to be enemies. You're not going to vaccinate your kid? Well, I'm vaccinating my kid, but let's let our kids grow up together and be best friends. You know, I think acceptance of differences, I mean, wouldn't that fix everything?

[Alex Clark]

What should a new parent read or watch to learn about each vaccine? The ingredients, pros and cons.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Hey, well, I'm going to be selfish and say that that's kind of my number one passion is to create materials that people can use to research this. Because I'm one doctor in my office, I have my patients, I can have this conversation with every patient. But there are people all over the country and all over the world that can't have this conversation with me. So I created my website that people could go to. They can watch a one hour video of me having a conversation just like this, discussing all the pros and cons of vaccines. That's kind of the, the, the, the shortest time commitment, a one hour video. And then I have a four hour podcast video series where we go into more depth that you can link to on my website. Of course I have my books on vaccines that'll take you a few weeks to read.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. And I think it's important to say, especially for your family members or friends who are skeptical of skipping out on vaccines, your book, the vaccine book goes through. Is it all vaccines on the schedule? And it breaks down. Here's the argument for why People would get this vaccine and then also why people wouldn't and then list all of the ingredients. I thought that was so perfect. I feel like that is the book that I am asked. Basically, they describe your book. My audience does like, do you know of a book that does this? Your book does. And so it's not your, it's not your opinion. It's. You just give the facts. And then really it's the parent reading the book gets to make the opinion. But you do say, well, what would you do, Dr. Bob, about each vaccine? And then you give your opinion for those that are wanting it on each individual one.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right, right. I almost give my opinion.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But I feel like the feedback I've gotten from patients is like, I've read your book, but I still don't know what to do. And that's where those consults with me, either in person, in the office, or on the videos. I feel like people need someone to sum it up for them. And not everyone has a month to read a book. So I even have this on my video podcast series. I have a one hour series. That's why do parents question vaccines? So if that's all you want to know, you just want your neighbor or your spouse or your friend simply to understand why you're questioning vaccines. Spend an hour listening to this. And so I've tried to create smaller time commitments for people who don't have months and years to research it with all the resources and tools where if they want to spend months researching it, they certainly can.

[Alex Clark]

And I, you offer like an all access pass thing, which is a couple months of research, so that while they're pregnant or even before getting pregnant, they can get all the information and have a place where they can ask you any question and get it answered directly from you, even if they're not your. Your patient, like locally. Right, right, right.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. I've decided to, you know, make myself available with educational materials to anyone, you know, all over the world that wants to do their homework, do the research, and then have access to me to be able to ask me questions by email or ask me questions in person on my webinars. What I found is when I wrote the book all those years ago and I, and I just updated a few years ago, you know, with the COVID chapter, I was thinking, oh, this is going to be the best book ever. People are going to read it and be able to make their decisions. I still find people that they take in all the information, but they need, need something extra from a doctor to help Guide them into that final do I do it or do I not do it? And that's what these new materials are designed to do.

[Alex Clark]

Is your practice currently accepting new patients?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

My practice has always been open to new patients, especially newborns. I love newborns. Newborns are the best part of pediatrics.

[Alex Clark]

Really?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, there's so much.

[Alex Clark]

See, I would think it would be like toddler age or something because they can talk and be funny and stuff.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That is a great age, too. I like all the ages, but newborns are especially dear to my heart. That young family getting started with a new baby, I love that part of pediatrics. And so I think no matter how busy I get, I'm sure I'm always going to be open to having new newborns come in to my practice.

[Alex Clark]

And your practice is in Dana Point?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, Dana Point, California.

[Alex Clark]

Thank you so much, Dr. Bob, for coming on Culture Apothecary.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, I appreciate you having me on. It's been a lot of fun. It's. It's fun to do this in person.

[Alex Clark]

Well, hopefully I did okay because, you know, I don't have kids yet, so I just try to ask the questions. I think my audience wants to know. But I'm glad that you have this whole thing that they can sign up for and ask you more questions if they've got them.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, that's my greatest passion. I love answering patients questions about vaccines. And for some reason that area has just fascinated me so deeply, starting so many years ago, way back in medical school, I could just spend the rest of my career answering vaccine questions for patients.

[Alex Clark]

And you know how I got Dr. Bob was midwife Lindsay Meliss recommended him. They're close friends. She sends a lot of her patients, probably almost all of them to Dr. Bob there in Orange County. So I knew that he was going to be great because she said he is the best. You've got to get him on for a pediatrician on vaccines. So thank you to Lindsay. Thank you so much. Every parent, expecting or not, needs to read the vaccine book by Dr. Bob. Also a great baby shower gift. Give that and the wise traditions. 1. Don't forget that this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and is for informational purposes only. You should consult with your doctor with further questions. New episodes of Culture Apothecary come out every Monday and Thursday night at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern. Anywhere you get your podcast. You can watch each episode on Spotify or YouTube, except this one. It's only Spotify and X at Yo. Alex wraps with a Z. Follow us on Instagram at Culture Apothecary. And please leave a five star review for Dr. Bob. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Apothecary.