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After Hours: Mary Holland on Exposing What’s Really Behind Our Autism Epidemic
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Hi everybody, it's Cheryl Achison. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After Hours. Today, decades after we entered an emergency state with an autism epidemic, the disorder shows no signs of slowing. Mary Holland of Children's Health Defense says finally, there may be people at high levels in government committed to finding answers and slow stopping it rather than covering it up and normalizing it. Despite the narratives that you will occasionally hear that there's just greater diagnosis of autism or the autism cases are all completely normal, those ideas have been universally dispelled by credible scientists who are not conflicted by having connections to the pharmaceutical industry. But the idea that that propaganda still exists and circulates shows just how effective it's been among some 25 years ago, we all knew this autism thing was an emergency, but the government got very busy covering it up on behalf of pharmaceutical interests and explaining it away, even though their own research and cases and decisions and court settlements pointed to various vaccine related factors. Now, a generation or more doesn't even remember when the autism epidemic wasn't horrifyingly common. And so I think to many of them, efforts to convince people it's just normal, it's always been this way are somewhat effective in some corners. Well, finally, there are people at the helm of politics who are not wholly in the pockets of the vaccine industry interests, and they are taking independent looks at things that have been covered up or censored or swept under the rug for decades. In this week's upcoming episode of Full Measure, I take a look at the current state of autism prevalence in the U.S. i often say that if around the 1985 period, you would have told rational people and scientists and doctors that there would be an epidemic of a mysterious brain disorder that pops up out of practically nowhere and afflicts so many American children, the right course of action would have been to declare an emergency and try to figure out how to prevent that or how to stop it. And yet that's not what happened because those who were implicated in some of the causes behind the autism epidemic got very busy. They foresaw what was ahead and spent a lot of money buying influence and worked very hard to try to create narratives that would deflect from the obvious, that would make people somehow grow quiet and not question this emergency or treat it as though it were a national emergency. Well, we're going to speak with a woman who's been watching all of this ever since she says her own son got autism from his vaccines decades ago. Today, Mary Holland heads up Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposures causing them. Here's Mary Holland.
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C
I grew up in a hyper medicalized family with two MD Parents in academic medicine and clinical research. I considered actually going into medicine, decided, not became a lawyer. My first passion was related to human rights in the Eastern bloc in the Soviet Union. I lived in the Soviet Union many years. And while I was living there, I had a son. And I moved back to the United States in 1998. And by the time he was 2 years old, he was already regressing into what was then called autism. And so that became my second passion. And in a sense, it's still my passion. And it was very clear there was no cogent explanation for what was happening to him other than he had had very serious toxic exposures through his early recommended vaccination schedule. And so I sort of took that under advisement, started doing biomedical treatments. He's remarkably better, is now a young adult. But it became I then started teaching at Columbia Law School and at NYU School of Law. But on the side, I was doing research related to vaccine law and policy. And that sort of brought me to Children's health defense in 2019.
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D
What's a paragraph Children's Health Defense paragraph.
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C
On Children's Health Defense is it started as something called the World Mercury Project, and it was really focused on thimerosal in vaccines, ethylmercury being half by weight of thimerosal. In 2017, Bobby Kennedy became part of the board of World Mercury project and in 2018 changed the name to Children's Health Defense. I joined the board in 2018, and then I came on staff in 2019 as general counsel. Bobby Kennedy continued as chair of the board and litigation council through 2022 when he left to run for president. So he left the board and the staff, and Children's Health Defense continues. And our focus is to expose what is happening to Children. There's an epidemic of chronic disease globally among children, but particularly in the United States. Over half of American children have some kind of chronic health conditions. So we want to expose it, we want to stop it, we want to put in place safeguards so that it can't happen again. We want to hold the culprits accountable for what's happened.
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D
What is the current status of how much autism is in the United States today?
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C
So In April of 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who, after his presidential bid became the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration. He announced the latest data that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts out every two years. And the current data is 1 in 31 children age 8 in the United States has autism. That's 1 in 12.5 boys in California. So a couple of footnotes to this. Autism is much more prevalent in boys and men than in girls and women. And the eight year old age is a very, very, very lagging indicator. Basically, at this point, children are diagnosed with autism at age 2 or age 3. You can be certain that the number of 2 and 3 year olds than the 1 in 31 number, it's probably closer to 1 in 20.
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D
Do you think that we stand to see bigger changes in addressing the autism epidemic now than we ever have? Because there's a new administration and Bobby Kennedy is HHS secretary. What do you see on the horizon?
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C
So I want to point out to you that even before 2016, now, President Trump was tweeting. That was a sort of an earlier technology at the time, but he was tweeting about autism. He was saying in his tweet, you know, there's something wrong with giving babies all of these shots. And he would tweet, I have seen in my own life these children go from being perfectly healthy to being autistic. Bobby Kennedy has, you know, as he explains, was sort of roped into this because as an environmental lawyer, he was talking about the toxic exposure of mercury and water. He was talking about the rivers. He set up Riverkeeper. But moms would go to him and say, listen, if you care about the mercury in the water, you gotta care about the mercury in the childhood vaccine. And so, you know, sort of kicking and screaming. He was brought to look at the science and he was like, oh, my God. There's a huge, you know, there's a huge rift between the narrative that vaccines are safe and effective and the science that shows that, yeah, mercury causes brain damage, it causes all kinds of physical damage. So with Trump and Kennedy together we have never seen a duo like this in the US Government or frankly, in my view and the global health scene in my lifetime that I've been working on this and I've been working on this since, you know, the late 1990s. So there's a unique opportunity right now. And Kennedy has said that by September he will be coming out with data about why has there been this rise in autism? As he often says, it can't be genetic. There's no such thing as a genetic epidemic. It must be epigenetic or purely environmental.
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D
In simple terms, meaning there could be a genetic component that predisposes somebody to the injury if they have some kind of trigger or other exposure.
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C
So you brought this out, most importantly, Cheryl, in your interview with Bernadine Healy, who was at the time the head of, or had just retired recently as the head of the National Institutes of Health. Yes, probably there is a subset of people who have a certain genetic predisposition. And when they come in contact with the mercury in vaccines or the aluminum in vaccines, or all of the antigens, the format formaldehyde, the polysorbate 80, there's all kinds of very toxic ingredients in the childhood vaccine schedule. And some people will be vulnerable to that. And it helps to explain, Cheryl, sort of the breadth of the autism spectrum disorder. There's a saying that when you've met one kid with an autism spectrum disorder, you've met one kid with an autism spectrum. The distinctions on this spectrum are incredible. No two kids are exactly the same. There's certain characteristics, but everybody's different.
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D
Well, it's said that we have simply put a general name to something we don't fully understand. It's a group of potentially brain injured kids that we call autism, that there are many subsets and probably even you tell me what you think of this other exposures. If the chemicals, if it's accepted that chemicals and vaccines can do this to children, there are a lot of other chemical exposures kids are getting today as well. So are you looking as someone who focused on vaccines early on, are you looking at other contributing causes?
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C
So we at Children's Health Defense don't look exclusively at vaccines. We do look at vaccines because we think they're so important for vaccines. Or 3 to 4 are recommended for pregnant women. And then in the first two years of life, it's over 30 vaccines and it's over 70 by the time a child is 18. So it's a really important. It's injected into the body, it's mandated by the state. So we focus on that. And there's liability protection for the industry and the healthcare profession. But we're also looking at the water, we're also looking at the air, we're also looking at the food supply, we're looking at the pesticides that are used. And we believe that it is a toxic load that we have to look at. You can't look at one factor. They integrate. They're synergistic. We have a book coming out in September that will be time for when Robert Kennedy is going to be coming out with what's the deal with the prevalence of autism? It's about the toxic load. It's about the total load. And it's a book by Patty Lemmer, who's been studying this issue for about 50 years of developmental disabilities. It's not one thing, and we would be foolish to think that it's just one thing. But. But vaccines are. Vaccines are different because they are mandated by the government and because there's a liability shield for the people that give them and the people that produce them that makes them absolutely unique. And they're being administered prenatally and postnatal.
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A
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C
That's okay.
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D
Experian. Other than Kennedy coming out with an idea of what could be causing the prevalence, what factors, what else do you see in terms of actions the government may take or things they may do on this arena?
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C
Well, Robert Kennedy has appointed an attorney, Andrew Downing, to be the person to oversee reform of the injury compensation program. We have millions of people in this country with autism diagnoses. Cheryl. Most of them cannot work. As Robert Kennedy said in his address in April, many of them can't speak, they can't hold jobs, they can't manage their own toiletry. They can't leave the house on their own. Many of them have comorbid conditions, gastrointestinal problems. So we have a population as now adults since about the early 1990s that we've never had before in this country. And we have to deal with that. And there are a lot of issues around this, around housing, around medical care, around support. But the person who's appointed Downing to oversee this compensation program, they have a lot of issues to deal with. It is A broken system, as Robert Kennedy just said yesterday, it is not compensating the vast majority of people who are in fact injured by vaccines. And one of the things about that is, does this autism term, is that helpful in describing the problem or in solving the problem? I would argue it's really not because it's a Chinese menu in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM 5, which is a category of psychiatric disabilities. It's not a psychiatric disability. This is actually the brain manifestation of what I believe was a toxic physical exposure. And so I think we will make a lot more headway when we actually look at this more as brain injury and other medical injuries, rather than as this vague kind of amorphous term that's been redefined several times by the American Psychiatric Association. So I think that that reform is important. I think there are other, you know, I think we have a lot of work to do. This is now 2 million people in the United States.
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D
There are people who say there were always a great number of autistic people, even in my time when they were kids. And prior to that, they just weren't called autistic. They were kids who were thought to be a little bit strange or a little bit odd, not fitting in that type of thing. What are your thoughts about that?
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C
Yeah, I think that is absolutely false. I think that Robert Kennedy, in the speech he gave about these numbers in April was very clear. There was early science done in the early 1990s that looked at prevalence and they used the same instruments. Now, it was not as prevalent. I remember in the Obama administration, it was 1 in 150 and people worried. It's now 1 in 31.
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D
People were alarmed when it was 1.
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C
In 150 originally, as well they were should be. It is extremely challenging to raise children on the autism spectrum and have them fit into the society that we have. It's very, very challenging. And the challenges vary by the individual, by the family. But this is. It's not normal, Cheryl. It's not. And I understand that young people today growing up, you know, autism sounds like a cool term, and they have special needs kids in their classes, and it's been normalized, but it's not normal. And one of the early researchers who studied autism, Dan Olmsted, who sadly has passed, but a journalist who founded the Age of Autism with his co author on Many Things, Mark Blaxill, he went to go look at the Amish community 20 years ago where they don't vaccinate their children. Guess what? No cases of autism except for Maybe one or two. And guess what was the fact for those kids? One or two, they'd been adopted. They had been adopted into the Amish community. So they'd received early vaccines in homeschooling populations. We, Bobby Kennedy, and our chief science officer, Brian Hooker, wrote a book called Vax Unvax. Let the science Speak. They looked at a meta analysis of about. I forget the number, but dozens of studies that happen to have information with vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. By every metric, Cheryl, by every single metric, whether it was allergies or allergic rhinitis or asthma or autism or ADD or diabetes, by every metric, the unvaccinated children are healthier. That's just the facts.
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D
The one thing the government has not, to my knowledge, publicly agreed to do, for whatever reason, is study vaccinated versus unvaccinated, and these health outcomes and autism in particular. But I read some years ago they do an annual survey, I believe, where they call parents and they get information on other things, how many kids they are giving vaccinations to and that sort of thing. They could ask those people these questions. Is there any thought or sense that Kennedy would help embark upon such a study that I think needs to be done. If you look at that and the numbers don't bear out, then look in a different direction. But if the numbers seem to point to a vaccine cause that would be very easy to find.
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C
He is absolutely working with data analysts and statisticians now to look at the data that is available through Medicaid and Medicare and look at the correlations. Absolutely, there are factual answers to these questions. There are unvaccinated people. They are being tracked in the vaccine safety data link that has been kept secret. One of the things that Kennedy has said he wants to do is to make the vaccine safety data link, which is about 10 million records available to people, so that independent scientists can look at it. I mean, as we well understand, the federal government and the state governments have been so conflicted on this issue. The Centers for Disease Control is a vaccine manufacturer. They are the biggest buyer. They account for 50% of the vaccines bought in this country through a program called Vaccines for Children. They also, the federal government is the injury compensation program. They also are the ones that gave indemnification to the vaccine producers. They're also making royalties at the National Institutes of Health off the vaccines that they co partner to research. It is so conflicted. And then, not to mention the scientists who sit on these advisory boards who have financial interest in these vaccine manufacturers. So it's an onion. They're peeling back the layers. I pray that there's enough time to peel them back during this administration because the federal government and the state governments have been really bad on this issue. In my view, the ethic of modern medicine is prior, free and informed consent. That's what the Nuremberg Code code said coming out of medical atrocities in World War II that has been amplified and built on. So it's not just about research. It's about all treatment preventive and treatment for disease and any kind of intervention. We're not following that. We need to have true, prior, free and informed consent, which means people don't have to give a reason if they don't want to take a vaccine. You can't, in my view, force parents to vaccinate their children when it goes against not only their religious beliefs, but their scientific understanding. Why do I want to inject my child with something that's never been properly tested? As mercury had never been properly tested, aluminum's never been properly tested, polysorbidi has never been properly tested. Why should I be obliged to do that and put my child at risk? No parent wants to be forced to put their child's health at risk. And that is the reality today. That is the reality.
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D
Looking ahead, what would you say is the message people should have as we move forward and thinking about the prevalence of autism in this country and how long this has gone on?
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Well, I think, sadly, we have to recognize that governments, medical authorities, medical institutions, hospitals, they are conflicted. They have financial interest in this. They have potential liability for this. And so they have lied to us.
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D
Us.
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And they have lied to us for decades. And this all reached a whole new level when Congress passed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury act, which gave complete liability protection to industry and to the medical profession. So I think when you understand, forgive them, but they are conflicted. You don't have to listen to them anymore. And in 45 states, we have religious exemptions. If I believe it's against my religion to put my child's life on the line as I do, you have the basis of a religious exemption. Just don't do it. Just don't do it. And I am fighting at Children's Health Defense with many others to restore religious rights in the five states that lack them right now. You don't have to say yes to putting your child's life and health at risk. You just don't and you shouldn't, in my view, or it's up to you. I want to say I support parents to do whatever they think is right. If a parent looks at the information that's out there and says, I think my child should get a measles vaccine, well, sad to say, there is no separate measles vaccine. You have to get an mmr, measles, mumps, rubella. But if you believe that that is the best thing for you to do for your child's health, God bless you, then that is your decision. But every parent should have that right to do what they think is right for their child.
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D
Thank you. And do you say on geoengineering or weather modification, what are your thoughts? So even to me, that just sounded crazy. Not all that long ago, but it's actually well documented. Where are we with that? And why does it seem to be discussed more publicly now than I've ever heard it?
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C
Well, I think it's interesting. I think there are many things that are now being discussed more than they've been discussed in the past. And certainly I think there is now much more of a public discussion of geoengineering than there has been. So, as you point out, I mean, President Johnson back in the 60s said very openly at a public address, he who controls the weather controls the world. We use geoengineering in the Vietnam War, Operation Popeye. There's zero factual dispute about that. Haarp, noaa, are federal agencies that are engaged, engaged in monitoring the climate and engaged in geoengineering. There's no real dispute about that. There are private commercial entities that are engaged in cloud seeding. They are creating rain. We know that that's not so hard either to forestall the rain or to make the snow, those things. We know that. But does this account in any way for some of the really severe weather issues that we're seeing right now? We're seeing in California and Hawaii, recently in Texas, Texas in Asheville, North Carolina. Does that help to explain these severe weather events? I don't think we really fully know, but we've got to look into this. And if our taxpayer money is actually contributing to these floods and to these outrageous fires and to the displacement and the deaths of, you know, these poor camp children in Texas, we've got to uncover that. We've got to stop that. So it's interesting a couple states have now passed legislation to try to prevent geoengineering. I'm not sure they're effective yet, to be honest with you, Tennessee and Florida, because I think the geoengineering occurs at a higher level than the state actually may have jurisdiction over. But I think we need to be exposing this. So we at Children's Health Defense, every Sunday morning on our CHD TV platform, we have the geoengineering report and we have Dr. Dayton Wigginton, who's been sort of an expert in this area, who does something called Geoengineering Watch. We have him give a report every Sunday to our audience. And so that's one of the other major things we're looking at. We're also spending a lot of our effort looking at electromagnetic radiation Again.
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D
Okay, just a minute. Let me not leave the. If you don't mind.
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C
Sorry. No, not at all.
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We know about cloud seeding. Are there other forms of geoengineering that are possible or being done as far as you know?
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C
Well, I'm not an expert in this area, but I do think that there are ways to shift the weather. There are absolutely ways that the government has the right to do or the control to do to make certain areas cooler and make certain areas hotter. And so Dr. Dane Wigginton's hypothesis is that geoengineering is being used to cool down the eastern part of the United States of east of the Mississippi river, where most of the American population lives, so that they're not as concerned about this issue. But in the western states, in Nevada, Arizona, California, there are places that are really, on a regular basis hitting really, really high temperatures and experiencing fires.
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D
By us not necessarily knowing what's fully going on. At least a lot of people think we don't have all the answers. Does it imply there's a secret federal project of some kind going on or more than one project of such a secret nature?
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C
Well, you know, I think what we don't know about is not necessarily that it's secret, but certainly the mainstream media, the corporate media doesn't cover these issues. So it's not a secret. The Congressional Research Service has done several reports on geoengineering. This is solar, you know, modification srm, solar radiation management is well understood by Congress as a reality that the government is putting money towards the corporate media for whatever reason, whether they're being told not to cover it or it's not in their interest. Cover, I don't know. They don't cover it. But it's not technically a secret. I think there's a lot of things out there that are just coming to the fore now. What's actually happening sort of of. It's not fully a secret, right? Like the indemnification of the vaccine industry and doctors. It's not a secret. But the mainstream media has never covered that the pharmaceutical industry sponsors their ads. So I do think that there's a lot going on with geoengineering and we at Children's Health Defense because it affects all of us, especially if they're spraying things like aluminum and strontium and barium, as we believe they are. Well, that's affecting our food supply. That's affecting the fertility of the soil. That's affecting all animal and plant life. So it has a huge impact. Again, as we said then, how does that interact with fluoridated water? How does that interact with somebody who's just had an injection of aluminum? We don't really know.
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D
And then what is your work on 5G?
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C
Well, we have a program called Stop 5G. And we're starting a lawsuit called 704, no More. So similar to this 1986 act that indemnified the pharmaceutical industry and doctors for vaccines, in the early 1990s, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. Section 704 says basically localities and states cannot oppose electromagnetic radiation towers or antennas put in their district. There's federal preemption, federal law applies. If the federal governments, if the Federal Communications Commission said, yeah, you can go ahead, Verizon, you can go ahead, whoever. There's nothing that the local community could do. We've supported local communities in Idaho and mountain Massachusetts and many places in the countries. We always lose those cases. So we've now decided, with 100 grassroots organizations on this around the country, we want to go after this Telecommunications Act. We want to go back to Congress and say this is simply wrong. Local communities who are going to be irradiated, who are then at higher risk of strokes, of cancers, of tinnitus, of brain problems, they have to have a say or they have to have some kind of exemption. And so we're fighting that because, again, industry has not. And the government that is supported by industry, they don't really want to tell us these cell phones, these tablets, these laptops, these computers, they all these antennas, these towers, they emit radiation. I remember as a child, Cheryl, like going to places where you'd see the yellow signs. Radiation, go back, stay away. And now everybody has as sources of radiation in five rooms of their house. It's crazy. And again, it's not secret that cell phones cause radiation. It's not a secret that in the fine print it says, never hold that up to your head. It's not a secret that it says, hold it at least six inches away. But nobody's really talking about that. Nobody's really saying, gee, maybe those brain tumors glioblastoma is related to your cell phone. Maybe some of those breast cancers that a friend of mine had because she was holding her phone reading at best at night. Maybe that is related to your cell phone. The media is run by corporations, essentially, and it's not in their interest to talk about the side effects, the bad effects of their products. Okay.
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D
Thank you. Great.
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C
You're welcome.
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D
Everything you care about, we care about here.
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C
We're so grateful to you, Cheryl, for your work.
- [29:47]
D
No, I think we have so much.
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C
Do you have enough? Do you want.
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D
Yeah. Yes, because we've. We've.
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B
Yeah, we've. You're over.
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D
We have more. We have more topics that you could speak to, but I don't know.
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C
We're just. Whatever works, you guys.
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B
I hope you'll watch the full story on Sunday, September 28th on full measure. To find out how to watch near your, go to Cheryl Akison.com and click the Full Measure tab for a list of stations and times. Or you can always watch after the fact at FullMeasure News or our unadvertised YouTube channel, Full Measure with Cheryl Atkison on YouTube. I sure hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that you will consider sharing it with your friends, subscribing and leaving us a great review. Check out my other podcast, the Cheryl Akisson Podcast. And for a deep dive, an investigative look at a lot of these related topics. Consider reading my latest bestseller, follow the How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures and Prevails. And lastly, Visit the Cheryl Atkison store by going to cherylakisson.com and clicking the Store tab. Proceeds from these clever items designed for independent thinkers like you, as well as proceeds from Follow the Science, support independent reporting causes. You can find products in the store with with interesting and original slogans I'm sure people you know will appreciate, such as I need to find some new conspiracy theories. All my old ones came true. And do your own research. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself.