Trump’s Hepatitis Vaccine Lies

Summary

It Could Happen Here – "Trump’s Hepatitis Vaccine Lies"
October 9, 2025, Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Mia Wong sits down with Dr. Kaveh Hoda (hepatologist, co-host of House of Pod) to unpack the latest surge of disinformation and policy destruction in U.S. public health, particularly focusing on falsehoods about the hepatitis B vaccine promoted by President Trump and RFK Jr. The conversation explores how anti-vaccine ideology has moved from the fringe to federal policy, the devastating real-world impact of these changes, and the bizarre rabbit holes of recent public statements on vaccines and public health.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Collapse of U.S. Public Health (04:08–05:56)

• Systematic Dismantling: Mia frames the episode as a revisit to ongoing coverage of the “annihilation of the entire US medical establishment at the federal level,” now being overseen by “fringe anti-vaccine cranks.”
  • “It is being systematically dismantled…and are now running like, the most sophisticated…public health institutions that have ever existed.” (Mia, 04:16)
• The Importance of Chaos: Dr. Hoda acknowledges the backdrop of “chaos” as the only reasonable response to the present state of things, both as catharsis and as a public duty.

The Anti-Vax Playbook: MMR and Autism Myths Resurface (05:52–09:20)

• Trump and RFK Jr.'s Announcements: Both made widely covered, baffling claims that vaccines cause autism and ADHD, leveraging disproven studies and conspiracy thinking.
• Trump's MMR Remarks: Trump suggested again that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine should be split into three separate shots.
  • “Trump actually really harped on vaccines and his thoughts, his medical opinion, and his advice on how to manage vaccines. It’s truly bizarre.” (Dr. Hoda, 06:31)
  • Key Fact Check: No medical evidence supports splitting the MMR vaccine; doing so increases the risk of missed doses and outbreaks.
  • “The more you split these things up, the more likely you’re gonna end up missing doses…measles is bad. Lower vaccination rates quickly lead to outbreaks.” (Dr. Hoda, 07:14)
• Wakefield’s Discredited Study: Mia briefly reviews Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study, clarifying the original split-vaccine claim was for self-interest—Wakefield tried to sell his own vaccine.
  • "It's literally an industrial complex...They're all trying to sell you something. That's the whole thing." (Mia, 09:04)

Media Manipulation and Dilution (09:54–11:14)

• Clip-Editing of Trump: Both note that media outlets often over-edit Trump’s rambling vaccine statements, making him appear more coherent than reality for manageability and palatability.
  • “The version people are seeing is not the version where he’s just sort of completely ranting incoherently…” (Mia, 11:09)
• Fire Hose of Nonsense: Dr. Hoda coins the phrase for the unrelenting barrage of misleading info.
  • “The fire hose in this of Nonsense. Yeah, Title of my first album, Fire Hose of Nonsense.” (Dr. Hoda, 11:21)

Trump’s Hepatitis B Vaccine Misinformation (16:55–19:47)

Fundamental Misunderstandings

• Trump’s False Claim: Trump asserted hepatitis B is solely sexually transmitted, suggesting infants don’t need the vaccine—pushing for the vaccine only at age 12.
  • “He talked about breaking up the hepatitis B vaccine…things that doctors would have a little pause to say so strongly.” (Dr. Hoda, 17:55)
• Science Reality: Dr. Hoda explains hepatitis B is transmitted not only through sex or needles but also commonly mother-to-child during birth, through household contacts, shared razors or toothbrushes, and more.
  • “There are other modes of transmission for getting hepatitis B, not just sex, like Trump was saying. So I think that’s super important to be clear.” (Dr. Hoda, 24:51)

What Hepatitis B Really Is

• Education Segment:
  • Hepatitis B = viral inflammation of the liver, millions affected worldwide.
  • Serious impacts include chronic infection (especially if contracted as an infant), cirrhosis, liver cancer, and lifelong consequences.
  • “If you get it when you’re young and your immune system is not super robust…it’s very likely about 90% or more…you’ll get chronic infection from it.” (Dr. Hoda, 20:50)
  • The vaccine, introduced for infants in 1991, led to a 94% decrease in U.S. children and adolescent infection rates by 2004—a major public health victory.

Bizarre Policy Proposals

• Age 12 Vaccination?
  • Trump’s reasoning presumes children do not contract hepatitis B in non-sexual ways—a dangerous, scientifically invalid premise.
  • “Why does he think that's okay then? Does he think that kids are having sex at the age of 12 and that's okay? Why did 12 become the number for him?” (Dr. Hoda, 27:01)
• Stigma as Policy Tool: Mia notes the stigmatization angle: using the “sexually transmitted” label to rationalize rolling back childhood vaccination.

Consequences of Delaying or Limiting Vaccination

• Delaying (as with MMR) leads to more missed doses and declining immunity, increasing outbreaks.
• “The more likely you are to not do it at all and have decreased uptake.” (Dr. Hoda, 28:33)

Who’s Running the Show Now? RFK Jr., Dr. Marty Makary, and the ‘Second Hell’ of Appointments (37:45–41:51)

• RFK Jr. at HHS:
  • “My line on it was millions will die and we are so incredibly on track for millions to die from just this guy and his people being put in charge.” (Mia, 40:14)
• Dr. Marty Makary at FDA:
  • Known for the misleading claim that medical errors are the #3 cause of death in the US—a factoid with questionable data and enormous persistence in anti-vax circles.
  • “It's like the herpes of medical misinformation because it always comes back. No matter how many times it gets disproven…” (Dr. Hoda, 39:01)
  • This anti-intellectual, contrarian style replaces even the previous era’s “incompetent but passive” agency heads with active disassemblers: “How wild it is that we long for the days of Rick Perry.” (Dr. Hoda, 37:21; Mia, 37:25)
• Bottomless Barrel:
  • "The bar is so low that, like, you have to go digging to get under the bar….The bar truly is below hell. There’s like a second hell down there…” (Mia, 41:26)

Silver Linings and Hopeful Notes (42:47–45:11)

• Get Vaccinated: Dr. Hoda encourages everyone to pursue all available recommended vaccines, despite mounting institutional obstacles.
• On Questioning Science:
  • Not all public skepticism is bad; scientific discourse requires nuance, honest curiosity, and patient exploration. The Tylenol-autism question had some foundation for scientific exploration, but evidence disproved a causal link.
  • “I encourage people to…find trusted sources and look at those and learn about them yourself…There is some good coming from this.” (Dr. Hoda, 44:48)
• Power in Numbers:
  • “There are more of us than there are of them. There always have been…we can be that reversal one person at a time.” (Mia, 45:11)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Firehose of Misinformation:

  • “The fire hose in this of Nonsense. Yeah, Title of my first album, Fire Hose of Nonsense.” (Dr. Hoda, 11:21)

• On Vaccine Policy Changes:

  • “If you didn’t know that there was another means of transmission, what he said is reasonable…But it’s just wrong.” (Dr. Hoda, 29:49)

• On Public Health Leadership:

  • “We put the worst people in charge of quite possibly the most important part of our country.” (Dr. Hoda, 40:07)

• On Social Hope:

  • “I see more and more people who care about science…there are bright spots out there, and that’s what I cling to.” (Dr. Hoda, 44:48)
  • “Their ability to shape the world is disastrous…but as a minoritarian force…is always going to be limited and is always going to be in danger of simply being reversed.” (Mia, 45:11)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Annihilation of Medical Establishment: 04:08–05:56
• Breakdown of Trump’s Vaccine Lies (MMR): 06:13–09:20
• Media’s Role in Shaping Perceptions: 09:54–11:14
• Trump’s Hepatitis B Vaccine Statements: 16:55–19:47
• What Hepatitis B Really Is: 19:47–25:07
• Modes of Transmission & Why Childhood Vaccination Matters: 25:29–28:33
• RFK Jr., Marty Makary, and Collapse of Medical Authority: 37:45–41:51
• Silver Linings & Civic Engagement: 42:47–45:49

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Tone & Style

The atmosphere is darkly comic, sardonic, and frequently incredulous, befitting the theme of “collapse as it happens.” Mia’s dry, almost gallows-humor approach is balanced by Dr. Hoda’s more earnest medical perspective, but both share a palpable frustration veined with determination and hope.

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Summary: This episode pulls back the curtain on how fringe pseudoscience has not only infiltrated but overtaken frontline public health policy, focusing on the immediate dangers and absurdities of recent hepatitis B vaccine disinformation from the highest levels. It also supplies practical, clear medical information, encourages critical thinking, and holds out hope for grassroots resistance and eventual reversal.

Transcript

[Mia]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Podcast Announcer]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu.

[Podcast Announcer]

Every single 32 lost nuclear weapons, you're like, wait, stop.

[Ad Voice]

What?

[Ed Helms]

Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna. Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep and cut it out.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

From iheart podcasts and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. This is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mia]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast beset by horrors of such magnitude that sometimes you have to go back to a thing that you just talked about because there were more horrors in it that you didn't have time to cover. The first time you went through the horrors. Sorry, the first two times you went through the horrors. And with me to talk about the horrors is Dr. Kave Hoda, who is a doctor, I guess, as you probably could have guessed from the title. You know, I scripted this out very poorly.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

No, this is great. You're doing great. Keep going.

[Mia]

I say scripted this out literally. The only part of this introduction that was in my notes was Kave Hoda, doctor and host of House of Pod and friend of the show, which was not in my notes either, but that's right, friend. The energy is chaotic today, friend.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Most importantly, it has to be. That is the normal response to what is happening in this world. If we don't embrace a little chaos, then we will lose our mind. So I am loving how this is going so far.

[Mia]

I am so glad because there is so much chaos One of the chaos things that we have been tracking and that you spend a hideous amount of time tracking. Too much on your show.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Far too much.

[Mia]

Yes. It's not good. It's very bad. Please stop doing this stuff so we can all go back to doing normal things in our lives.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I would love to just do more fart jokes and episodes on Poop.

[Mia]

But.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

But people in power keep saying and doing terrible things, Crazy, terrible things that make me feel like I'm losing my mind. So I have to keep doing this for multiple reasons. One, because someone's got to talk about it. Two, it's sort of therapy for me. Like, if I just internalize this, I'm going to be a miserable person. So thanks. Thanks for having me on.

[Mia]

Yeah. I'm excited to talk to you about. Well, okay. See this? Literally every single time I do an episode, it's like, I'm really excited to talk to you. And also. Jesus Christ, I wish we didn't have to talk about this. That's how everyone feels.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

That's how my patients feel. That's how my patients feel when they see me.

[Mia]

It's terrible. God, really, truly. We gotta stop meeting like this.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

One day. We'll do a fun episode one day.

[Mia]

I swear to God. Okay. But the thing that I've been talking about that we've both been covering is basically the annihilation of the entire US medical establishment at the federal level. It is being systematically dismantled. And one of the ways this being systematically dismantled is that a bunch of people have been put in charge of it who are. I mean, two years ago were fringe anti vaccine cranks and are now running like, the most sophisticated, like, public health institutions that have ever existed.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. As producer extraordinaire Sophie Lichterman once said, you can't put a hater in charge of the thing that they hate the most. And that is what has happened completely and fully almost at every step of this government. They find the person that hates it the most and they put that person in.

[Mia]

Yeah. And one of the big sort of. I don't know if turning points is the right word, but one of the major events we've been covering from this was the announcement by RFK Jr. And Trump that they had found what causes autism and also ADHD too, which got very little coverage. I think I said this last time I talked about this. It was very baffling. But there's just. There was so much in that whole thing that I think a lot of the stuff kind of fell through the cracks inside of like.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

But There was a lot of. There was a lot to digest.

[Mia]

There's so much. There's so much. And so I guess I wanted. We wanted to talk about mostly the hepatitis B thing, but also just sort of the broader anti vax stuff that was in this.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah.

[Mia]

Before we get into, I don't know, like, the weirder, more boutique anti vax stuff, which is like the anti hepatitis B vaccine stuff, a thing that I didn't realize people were against.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah.

[Mia]

Like children getting until, like now. And like, I follow these things decently closely.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah, let's.

[Mia]

Let's start a little bit with, like, let's ease the audience into this by going back to the classics, the greatest hits. They really only have one hit, the one hit of the anti vaccine movement, which was Trump's stuff about separating the MMR vaccine.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. So, yeah, recently during that press conference where he really threw Tylenol under the bus, he also, really, it was weird because there's no new evidence. I want to make that clear. There was no new evidence that they presented about vaccines. But Trump actually really harped on vaccines and his thoughts, his medical opinion, and his advice on how to manage vaccines. It's truly bizarre. Never seen a president say or do those sorts of things. But one of the things he mentioned was the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps, rubella. And he said that it should be split into three separate shots. Again, medically unfounded. It really, as you have alluded to, echoes these long debunked claims, these Wakefield like claims starting from back in 1998. Again, Wakefield was the disgraced author of that vaccine study that tied it to autism, lost his medical license for that, but that has persisted and carried on. And the seeds of that are still growing terrible, terrible plants and trees today. And one of them was this fruit of Trump saying we should break up the MMR vaccine. So just, I'll just say it up front. One, there's no reason to do that. There's no reason that shows improved safety. There's no credible evidence to suggest that at least. And more importantly, the more you split these things up, the more likely you're gonna end up missing doses. That is like a known fact. If you delay vaccines, if you split them up more than they need to be, there is a much greater chance you will miss that. In case this is not clear, measles is bad. It is one of the most contagious viruses out there. And lower vaccination rates quickly lead to outbreaks, as we're already starting to see. And when there's already some hesitancy in the community pushing it. Like, this is a terrible thing. So even though that was a throwaway statement from the President of the United States, it could have serious repercussions and it's very concerning.

[Mia]

And I've also, I have committed myself every single time this comes up. The Wakefield study, which is where this whole separate. The thing came up. A, it's not even a conclusion that even if you take his completely fake premise that he made up.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah.

[Mia]

It doesn't actually follow that you should split the vaccines up. It's baffling. But the second thing is the reason he wanted to split the vaccines up was that he was trying to sell his own vaccine.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Correct.

[Mia]

It was like he was just trying to sell his own vaccine. It makes me insane every single time this is talked about. Because this whole thing is medical. It's literally an industrial complex. It's like the anti vaccine industrial complex. They're all trying to sell you something. That's the whole thing.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I was watching Trump give this talk, this press conference and I think I said this on another show here on this channel. I started to disassociate. I'm like, yeah, this can't be real life. Am I dreaming? It felt like I was having an out of body experience. It did not feel real to me.

[Mia]

To be fully transparent, I did not make it through that press conference. Watching it on video, about like four minutes in, I was like, fuck this, I'm going to read the transcript. So I'm just working off the transcript because I was like, I can't.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

It was tough.

[Mia]

I can't do this.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

So on my podcast, the House of Pod, you should all listen to it. I played a clip from Trump talking about Tylenol and another clip of him talking about hepatitis B. And when you listen to it, when I listened back to it, as I was editing it, it sounded like I edited his clips to make him sound crazy. I did not. I just took straight from what he says and, and the way he was talking, it's hard to listen to. I mean, it's hard to read too, but the way he talks, it's so disjointed. And he just goes from one thought to the next. He does this weave thing that he thinks is so clever, but it's just lost. The threads are never brought back together. It's just an unraveled, terrible rug of lies. And that is why it's so hard to listen to him. I totally understand.

[Mia]

Yeah. And this has also been one of the things that most of the media has done is that in order to be able to play a listenable clip on air. Right. And also in sort of in service of power, they edit the clips to make him sound like a normal human being.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right.

[Mia]

So the version of it that people are seeing is not the version where he's just sort of completely ranting incoherently and like, you know, you just see these cliffs. But then also because they're editing it down progressively more and more like just more.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Stuff.

[Mia]

More just like information. Content gets lost every time, which is a problem because there's just like so much stuff.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

The fire hose in this of Nonsense. Yeah, Title of my, my first album, Fire Hose of Nonsense.

[Mia]

Incredible. Incredible. Oh God. Okay, so you know what? All right, we're going to a second fire hose of Nonsense. This is slightly early to be doing this, but fuck it, it's chaos week. We're doing it. Do you know what else is the fire hose of nonsense?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Oh, well, I wouldn't say it's nonsense. I would say it's very important in these bills. So it's very, very important. I believe in. I don't. I'm just kidding. I'm assuming. Ads and services.

[Mia]

Yeah, this is the products and services to support this podcast.

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[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

All I know is what I've been.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

Told and that to half truth is a whole lie.

[Podcast Announcer]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Podcast Announcer]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Mia]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Podcast Announcer]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said.

[Podcast Announcer]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her from Lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.

[Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[Ad Voice]

What?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah, Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid.

[Ed Helms]

70S basketball player who still wore knee pads.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[Podcast Announcer]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today.

[Podcast Announcer]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Podcast Announcer]

You know how waking up from a dream, a familiar place can look completely alien.

[Mia]

Get back, everyone.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest Corner of this town.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. This is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

The devil walks in Abbostown.

[Mia]

We are back. So amidst the torrent of, you know, the MMR stuff, which also, I do want to say very briefly, is sort of a baffling thing to be talking about in a thing where you're not blaming the vaccines for autism, you're blaming Tylenol, but then you're still also mad at the vaccine. It's very weird.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah, I had thoughts about that. You know, I felt like what Trump was doing with that by bringing up the vaccines stuff was I felt he was trying to console RFK Jr. In a way. I felt like he was like, okay, hey, we're moving away from the vaccine stuff to focus on this Tylenol stuff. But I know how much you love the vaccine stuff, rfk, so let's talk about that. So I felt like he was just throwing that out there to placate RFK Jr. That was my guess. But I don't know how to read sociopaths very well, so I could be wrong.

[Mia]

This could also just be what comes into his mind when he thinks about medicine.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right.

[Mia]

So, you know.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Oh, yeah. Again, weird to me that this president was giving medical advice. I mean, he was making statements. Yeah. Do not take tunnel. He said that multiple times. He talked about breaking up the hepatitis B vaccine, changing the hepatitis B vaccine that. The times of which I think we're going to talk about, because that is very important to me. And things that doctors would have a little pause to say so strongly. And even the people whose paper he's citing would say, oh, slow down a little bit with that. You know, it's very important. I think it's super impactful. And you're right, it's slipping under the radar. So I would love to talk about the hepatitis B stuff.

[Mia]

Yeah, let's do this.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

So I'll give a little background for your listeners who don't know me. I am a gastroenterologist and hepatologist. That's liver, not herpetologist, which is study of snakes, which sometimes people think online. I am a doctor that looks at the liver, and hepatitis B has an important place in my heart. It's a. It's a disease that can be incredibly devastating. It's incredibly common. It has so many complications. It has such long term ramifications on someone's life if they have it. So many things they have to consider, do follow up. So many possible things that can happen with it. And the thing about it is we have a vaccine for it that is very safe and super efficacious and works really well. And when we use it, it works amazing. In Trump during this conference through that a couple passing shots as he was doing this whole rant about Tylenol, et cetera. And those passing shots can have a huge impact on uptake in this country. I think it really needs to be discussed. So I'll stop there. I'll let you see what questions you have for me about hepatitis B. Because I could talk about hepatitis B for a long time.

[Mia]

Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to the very basic. How would you explain hepatitis B to a dear listener who knows many things, but what hepatitis B is, is not one of them?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yes. So hepatitis just means inflammation of the liver. Anything with itis means inflammation. And there are different ways of getting hepatitis or inflammation of the liver. They range from alcohol, medications, autoimmune problems, to viral things. And there are viral things that can cause hepatitis. Bad hepatitis affect the liver, primarily hepatitis A, B, C. You've heard of some of these hepatitis. And hepatitis B is a very common one in the world. It's about 2 billion people in the world have either had it or presently have it. About 880,000 people in the US alone have chronic hepatitis B. But if you actually look at studies that include more immigrant populations, that number can go up to about 2.2 million. Jeez.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

It is something that can. When you get it at an early age, when you're young and you're a baby or an infant, you're young and your immune system is not super robust yet. It's very likely about 90% or more, that if you are exposed to it, you'll get chronic infection from it. If you get it when you're older, it's a little different. You can have a pretty strong reaction to it. You'll get really sick potentially, sometimes to the point where the liver fails. But most people are, when they're older, able to clear it, they're going to eventually get rid of the virus to a point where the liver is fine and it manages, but it lives in the liver indefinitely. Once you get the hepatitis B, there's a very good chance you will have it forever. Whether or not it's causing you problems is another thing. A lot of people can live with it not have any problems, but a lot of people will get it and they will be very sick in the beginning. And when you get it as an infant, you have a very good chance of having it for the rest of your life. And that can be a major problem because like all viruses that go into the liver like this, all these viral hepatitis, what can happen is it can cause scarring, which you might have heard of when it's really bad, called cirrhosis. When that happens, the liver can stop working. You can get cancer of the liver. You can get big blood vessels in your esophagus called esophageal varices and vomit of blood. You can get a lot of bad things that happen. Now, what makes hepatitis B particularly insidious, it makes it a little bit even my opinion, more dangerous than a lot of other viral hepatitis is that you don't always have to go through these phases to get to the really bad part. Like when you have hepatitis C, for example, you get bad scarring over a long time. That can cause that cirrhosis. And that cirrhosis can lead to cancer. But since hepatitis B is a DNA virus, that DNA can get into the DNA of your liver cells and it can cause cancer without even having to go through those steps of cirrhosis. That's obviously terrible. And that can happen to young people. And I've seen it, and it's awful. So I'm saying all these terrible things about hepatitis B because it's one of these things that does not need to be. I didn't mean to say that like that. No, yeah, I didn't mean to make a play on words there. But it doesn't need to happen because we have this great vaccine that can manage this and when we use this vaccine, it works. In fact, in the US they looked at it between 1990, it was introduced in this country, like for infants in 1991. And when they looked from 1990 to 2004, they saw a 94% decrease in kids and adolescents who have hepatitis B. That's incredible. That's amazing. Right? That's really good. This is a great success story. And part of the reason people Trump don't recognize that this is an issue, it's because it's done well. Cuz this vaccine works and it does a good job. Now the other thing to discuss is how it is transmitted, cuz that's a big part of what Trump was saying during this press conference. Yeah, and he said it's sexually transmitted, which is true. That is one of the ways that you get it, but you also get it from the mother. The mother. When you're having a pregnancy and a delivery, it's a messy, bloody process, and that is a huge risk factor for the infant. Getting hepatitis B from the mother. There's also household things that can happen. You know, people share razors. That's a risk factor. Toothbrushes, small things, bites at daycare centers, all these things are small risks. They're not as common as sex or the childbirth ways of transmission. But there are other modes of transmission for getting hepatitis B, not just sex, like Trump was saying. So I think that's super important to be clear that. I think that is one of the major things he said that was wrong. He said a lot of things are wrong, but that's probably the biggest, easiest one to point out.

[Mia]

Yeah. And I think also it was interesting because that was one of the things that got followed up on by reporters, but the reporter was like, well, you can also get it from, like, reusing needles, which, like. Yeah, but like, not. Not mentioning the whole. You can get it from being born. A thing that everyone has to do. Statistically. This is true.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

The statistics bear that out. That is true. Yeah.

[Mia]

Percent rate of being born in order to exist.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

That's exactly. That's exactly right. You know, I realized why Trump says this. This is the realization I came to. He doesn't even think about this as a possible mode of transmission. If you've ever seen a delivery. I don't know if you have mia, but if you've ever seen someone give birth, whether it's natural, vaginal or cesarean or whatever. Whatever method, there is a lot of fluids, blood, mucus. There's a lot of fluids happening during this time exchange between mother and baby. And if you saw that, I think you'd be like, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense that you would get it that way. If you could get it through sex, why couldn't you get it through that? If you could get it by putting a penis into a vagina, for example, why couldn't you get it from being birthed from one? So you would see that, and it would make sense to you inherently and automatically. My guess is that Trump has not seen any of his kids delivered.

[Mia]

That would not surprise me.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

If he was in a nearby room, I would be impressed. He didn't want to cast aspersions on our president. I don't know. Maybe he was there cutting the umbilical cord. I don't know. But I get the sense he was not. And I feel like that's why in his mind, he doesn't even register it. And then the other thing that's weird about this is he's like, it's just me. I say that they get the shot at the age of 12 because it's sexually transmitted. And that makes me wonder, and I'm surprised no one's brought this up. Why does he think that's okay then? Does he think that kids are having sex at the age of 12 and that's okay? Why did 12 become the number for him?

[Mia]

It's so weird, and I don't know. That's truly one of the. There is something just deeply evil going on in his mind, but I have no idea what it is. And I can't follow the path of logic because I'm not like a billionaire who was born in, like, the 50s or whatever. Like, I don't know. That guy has seen. That guy has gotten brainworm from things that, like, don't exist anymore. No, he's born in the 40s. Sorry. My. My. My apologies for thinking he was born a full decade later than he actually was. Good Lord.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah, I mean, I. I think the results are still the same.

[Ed Helms]

Yeah.

[Mia]

But I mean, it's like, you know, there's just like, there's prejudices and weird stuff that he picked up rattling around there that, like.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah.

[Mia]

Who knows where they came from? And I think also, you know, one of the other angles about this that's sort of really distressing is this, like, what feels like the sort of stigmatizing aspect of it of just being like, oh, well, there's something you can only get, like, sexually transmitted. So, like, why are we giving this to kids? And it's like, well, yeah, but like, there's just like, a bunch of other ways that you can get it. And like, only talking about that one and then having it as an excuse to, like, raise the vaccination age for no reason.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

And that, you know, again, goes back to the MMR thing because, you know, when we talk about giving These doses, the WHO, the CDC, they recommend the birth vaccine within 24 hours or the first at least. Then the current schedule is you get at birth and follow ups at 1 to 2 months and then again at 6 to 15 months. And part of the thing of stretching that out, pushing that out further, again, same thing as the mmr, which is the more likely you are to not do it at all and to have decreased uptake.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

So this is the real reason why that's a concern.

[Mia]

Yeah. And it's this sort of decreased uptake is their goal.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right.

[Mia]

Like that's what they want. Like that's why RFK Jr. For example, is making it increasingly difficult to get like the COVID vaccine and the flu vaccine and stuff like that. And it's, you know, they're doing this sort of like double pronged approach of both establishing it from the top down through the medical bureaucracy of taking control of and also just like spreading it among their supporters and among people who are like, oh, the president wouldn't just like lie to me about medical stuff.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right.

[Mia]

That's unreasonable.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

And I mean, if you didn't know, if you didn't know that there was another means of transmission, what he said is reasonable, you know, why would you give an infant a vaccine for something they could only get through sex? I mean, yeah, you'd be like, sure, that makes sense, but it's just wrong.

[Mia]

Yeah.

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[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

All I know is what I've been.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

Told and that to have truth is a whole lie.

[Podcast Announcer]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Podcast Announcer]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Mia]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Podcast Announcer]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said.

[Podcast Announcer]

They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her from Lava For Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

America. Y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu Every single episode.

[Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[Ad Voice]

What?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70.

[Ed Helms]

Basketball player who still wore knee pads.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yes.

[Ed Helms]

It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[Podcast Announcer]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today.

[Podcast Announcer]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

There's a vile sickness in Ambas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[Podcast Announcer]

You know how waking up from a dream, A familiar place can look completely alien.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Get back, everyone.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of the this town.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manke, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

The devil walks in Abbostown.

[Mia]

It's kind of pointless to ask the question, does he know he's lying on this one?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

But I don't think he is. I honestly don't think he understands. I think he probably did hear that there are some other modes of transmission and in his mind it requires some sort of blood contact or some sort of mucosal contact in his mind. And that's how he interpreted it. And I think he just doesn't equate that with childbirth. I think he assumes it, like, because the child he sees comes out like perfectly wrapped and cleaned and, you know, looks like a little baby in like a blanket when he sees it.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

So I think, I think that's the thing. I think he believes this. I don't think he's lying on purpose on this one.

[Mia]

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

I don't know.

[Mia]

I think the interesting aspect of this is that this is like, was kind of just a Trump thing.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right.

[Mia]

Like, this is like one of the parts of it that like RFK Jr and Martin Makkari didn't really talk about. It was just Trump kind of just like started talking about it for reasons that are deeply unclear.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. I mean, Marty Makari is an interesting guy and I think he did some good things in the past and done some not so great things, some bad things.

[Mia]

Yeah. Would not be serving in this administration.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

This may shock you, Mia, but Trump picks somebody for a high level position that might be a little problematic.

[Mia]

Well, especially this version of the administration too, where it's like in Trump 1, it was possible for them for him to appoint someone random and it kind of be like Department of Energy. Right, Right. They put Rick Perry, who famously would call to or forgot that it was the thing that he wanted to abolish, but then he got in charge of it and the Department of People, like explained to him this is, this is where the nuke stuff is. And then he was like, sure, whatever, go run this. I'll just stay out of everyone's way. And that kind of worked fine. That is not happening. This administration, you are, you are not getting, you are not getting Rick Perry going to like a make work job, letting the bureaucrats run the actual stuff.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

How wild it is that we long for the days of Rick Perry.

[Mia]

Yeah. Like the days when someone could explain to you, hey, this is the department that does the nukes and they'd be. And they would change their opinion about it. Staggering. Incredible.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

So let me tell you a little bit more about this Makari character.

[Mia]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. So he is a surgeon. I don't think he practices as a surgeon anymore, but he's sort of a health policy expert. At least self fashioned as one. And he's the person that was tapped by Donald Trump to lead the fda. You've seen him on Fox News a lot. And he's been very outspoken about pandemic policies in the past. He was noted as one one of the greatest perpetrators of COVID misinformation during those times when people fact checked him again and again found that he was wrong. But the thing about him that you may or may not know, how I first learned of him and how he popped up on my radar a while back was he is the person that's responsible for this claim that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Sometimes that's cited a second. Yes, that's him. He's the person.

[Mia]

Oh boy.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right, right. Which. There's a lot of issues with this claim. It is at best controversial. It's based on extrapolated data. There was no formal methodology that went into him doing this. It totally misrepresents the complexity of healthcare and healthcare outcomes. But it's like the herpes of medical misinformation because it always comes back. No matter how many times it gets disproven or people talk about it, it always comes back and it's always used as this. It's an inherent part of the belief structure of these anti vaxxers. It is taken as gospel now. But back in 2016, basically he wrote this BMJ paper that estimated something like 250,000 deaths per year in US hospitals were due to medical errors. But again was not a formal study. It presented no new data and it didn't have any sort of real rigorous statistical method behind it. It kind of averaged figures from different sources. It, it doesn't actually even work because death certificates don't capture medical error. So it's hard to really study that even if you wanted to. But anyways, long story short, no matter how many times people disprove this or make arguments that work against it, it never goes away. So that's him. That's Makari.

[Mia]

Oh boy. Oh boy. And he's not running the fda, which is.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Oh yeah.

[Mia]

Which is great. Oh.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

We put the worst people in charge of quite possibly the most important part of our country.

[Mia]

Yeah. I mean just Health and Human services run by RFK Jr is just. When he first took office, my line on it was millions will die and we are so incredibly on track.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Right, right.

[Mia]

For. For millions to die from just this guy. Yeah. And his people being put in charge.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. I, I mean I should say one more thing. About Makari, before we move on from him, that claim, I wouldn't say that medical error isn't an issue. I think it is a very serious issue. Even if it's one or two cases in the whole country, it's a serious issue and that should be addressed. But what he's doing is, I think, harmful. I don't think that is helping in any way. I think it's only made things worse by contributing to where we're at today with our anti vaxx stance, our whole anti intellectual approach to medicine. And that's a thing that they do. This is a thing. They take a little kernel of truth. If there is any lack of knowledge, if there's any slight vacuum in understanding, it gets filled with these bad actors, these people. And he is, in my opinion, one of them. But still somehow not the worst, you.

[Mia]

Know, not the worst is one of those bars in the Trump administration where it's not even the bar so low, it's on the ground. The bar is so low that, like, you have to go digging to get under the bar. And it's not like a little bit of digging, it's a lot of digging because the bar truly is below hell. There's like a second hell down there. Find this bar for where these people are.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Oh, God, it's second hell.

[Mia]

Every. Every time I look into any of.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

These people, just, yeah, no, no, you're never gonna be surprised.

[Mia]

Hezgef hit a Marine with an axe. Like. Like this guy's just the Secretary of Defense now. He's like, he's the guy going in yelling at the generals is the guy who was on Fox News and he just throwing an ax and he threw it over the target and it hit a bunch of Marines. Like, wait, what are we doing here?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Well, who amongst us hasn't done that? Maybe he is the real antifa.

[Mia]

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I have never hit a Marine with an axe.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah. So, yeah. Well, there you go.

[Mia]

Tragic. Tava, do you have anything else that you want to tell our dear listeners about this whole debacle?

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Get your vaccines. Yeah, you know, get your vaccines, get vaccinated. Now's the time to start doing it for flu. And Covid, if you can, talk to your doctor, if you're having difficulty getting your vaccine from your local places, your regular places, talk to your doctor about getting it. You should still be able to in most cases, so do it while you can. And if you want to hear more about this stuff, make sure to check out my podcast. The House of Pod, where we're going to talk about the stuff a lot more. We'll also talk about other stuff, too, but you'll hear more on this along the way as well. And, you know, I like that people are questioning some of these things. I don't think it's unreasonable. Some of these topics are not unreasonable to have, as I discussed earlier on another podcast on this channel, I don't know channel. Is that what you say on this network? I should say the Tylenol autism question is not like a totally wacky crazy one. It was a decent question to ask. There was some correlation, but the evidence, when you look at it, shows that it is very likely not a causal relationship when you look at the evidence. And I think it's okay to have some of these conversations and sometimes it takes a little nuance when you look at them. But I encourage people to continue to do so and to keep reading and to find trusted sources and look at those and learn about them yourself. I think if nothing else good comes from all this, it's that people are starting to have an understanding of antibodies and the science behind vaccines. And I think that's not a bad thing. So, I mean, things are terrible. Things are terrible. There's so many bad things in the world. But I will say this. I see bright spots constantly. I see more and more people who care about science. I see more and more people than I ever have before care about important topics across the world that are not scientific, like Gaza, for example. I've seen more people care about things that I've ever seen before in my long life. And I feel like that's a good thing. There are bright spots out there, and that's what I cling to. And I see more people interested in this. People want to talk to me about hepatitis B and what it is and how to avoid it. And I think that's great. So there is some good coming from this.

[Mia]

Yeah. And this is, I think, the fundamental thing that both the media apparatus and the regime are trying to conceal, which is that there are more of us than there are of them. There always have been. And especially right now, there are way more of us. And their ability to shape the world is disastrous. But their ability to shape the world as fundamentally a minoritarian force in this country with 30 to 40% of the population is always going to be limited and is always going to be in danger of simply being reversed. And we can be that reversal one person at a time.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Yeah, I love that.

[Mia]

Well, Kaveh, thank you for being on the show and go listen to House of Pod. It's great.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

Aw, thank you.

[Mia]

Yeah, we're okay.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

You could do worse.

[Mia]

It Could Happen.

[Podcast Announcer]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more Podcast Podcast from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Dr. Kaveh Khoshnood]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu Every single episode.

[Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[Ad Voice]

What?

[Ed Helms]

Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Havoc Town)]

There's a vile sickness in Ambas Town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out.

[Havoc Town Promo Voice]

From iheart Podcasts and Grim and mild from Aaron Manke. This is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater audio universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.