Vaccination Controversies: Measles, Autism, and Health Risks | Dr. Bob Sears

Summary

Real Foodology Podcast Summary: "Vaccination Controversies: Measles, Autism, and Health Risks | Dr. Bob Sears"

Release Date: March 13, 2025

Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Real Foodology podcast, host Courtney Swan delves into the contentious topic of vaccinations with renowned pediatrician and author, Dr. Bob Sears. Aimed at unraveling the complexities surrounding vaccines and their impact on child health, the conversation addresses current measles outbreaks, the purported link between vaccines and autism, and broader concerns about America's vaccination policies.

Dr. Bob Sears’ Background and Vaccine Skepticism

Dr. Sears, a practicing pediatrician for over 25 years, shares his journey from a traditional medical practitioner to a vocal critic of certain vaccination practices. He recounts early experiences that sparked his doubts about vaccines, particularly the DTP vaccine, which he claims caused significant brain injuries in children during the 70s and 80s.

Dr. Bob Sears [00:17]: "I think pediatricians need to examine, what is it about our industry that's creating less healthy children than it was 50 years ago? Gotta figure it out. Otherwise, people are gonna stop going to the pediatrician."

Vaccines and Autism Link

A substantial portion of the discussion centers on the controversial association between vaccines and autism. Dr. Sears neither confirms nor denies the connection but emphasizes the lack of definitive research. He shares anecdotal evidence from his practice, where some parents noticed developmental regressions in their children following vaccination schedules.

Dr. Bob Sears [18:38]: "The bottom line is you take a large group of unvaccinated kids, 10,000, 20,000 of them, you should see 1 in 36 of them have autism... we haven't ruled in or ruled out the connection between vaccines and autism."

Current Measles Outbreak in Texas

With a measles outbreak currently unfolding in Texas, Dr. Sears provides insights into the situation, including the tragic death of a child. While initial reports suggested the child might have received a vaccine strain of measles, Dr. Sears cautions against premature conclusions without official confirmation.

Dr. Bob Sears [44:38]: "The risk of fatality is about one in every 10,000 cases of measles."

Natural Immunity vs. Vaccine Herd Immunity

Dr. Sears contrasts natural immunity acquired through infection with vaccine-induced herd immunity. He argues that natural exposure during childhood fosters a more robust and lasting immunity, protecting both the individual and the community more effectively than vaccines.

Dr. Bob Sears [53:46]: "Naturally occurring herd immunity... exercise our immune systems, give us the infection when it's almost always going to be harmless."

Increased Vaccine Schedule and Adjuvants Concerns

The conversation highlights the dramatic increase in the number of vaccine doses over the years, rising from approximately 24 doses in the 1980s to over 76 doses today. Dr. Sears expresses concern over the cumulative exposure to adjuvants like aluminum and formaldehyde, questioning their safety despite assurances from the medical community.

Dr. Bob Sears [77:09]: "We're injecting way too much aluminum into these infant bodies... There's no way that anyone can say that's safe because they have not done research on it."

Conflicts of Interest and Insurance Incentives

Dr. Sears exposes potential financial incentives that may influence pediatricians' stances on vaccinations. He explains how some insurance companies provide significant bonuses to doctors based on vaccination rates within their practices, creating a conflict of interest that may pressure physicians to advocate for vaccines regardless of personal beliefs about their safety.

Dr. Bob Sears [88:00]: "Medical insurance companies that contract with doctors will give doctors very large bonuses at the end of the year based on having fully vaccinated children in their practice."

Vaccine Mandates and Societal Division

The episode discusses the divisive nature of vaccine mandates, which have polarized parents and communities. Dr. Sears advocates for personal choice in vaccination decisions, arguing that mandates infringe upon individual freedoms and exacerbate societal tensions.

Dr. Bob Sears [85:21]: "The decision to vaccinate or not, to me, there's no right or wrong answer... to me, what's wrong on both sides would be to mandate your view of the situation."

Conclusion and Call for Open Discussion

Wrapping up the episode, both hosts emphasize the necessity for transparent conversations about vaccinations. Dr. Sears encourages ongoing research to provide conclusive answers and calls for dismantling conflicts of interest within health policy-making bodies. Courtney Swan applauds Dr. Sears for his courage and dedication to informed consent, urging listeners to seek comprehensive information to make educated health decisions for their families.

Dr. Bob Sears [95:50]: "Herd immunity is the age at which these diseases occur in nature... it's a legitimate medical and ethical question."

Additional Resources

Listeners interested in further exploring Dr. Bob Sears’ perspectives and research can visit his website at drbobsears.com, where he offers a range of books, podcasts, and other educational materials focused on pediatric health and vaccination debates.

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Note: The content of this summary is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Consult a healthcare professional for personalized medical guidance.

Transcript

[Courtney Swan]

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast, if our kids are getting worse.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I think pediatricians need to examine, what is it about our industry that's creating less healthy children than it was 50 years ago? Gotta figure it out. Otherwise, people are gonna stop going to the pediatrician.

[Courtney Swan]

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Courtney Swan, and today's episode is with Dr. Bob Sears. I was really excited to do this episode, but I also have to be honest. I'm not nervous to release this, but I do know that this is gonna be trig for a lot of people. It's really unfortunate that we've gotten to a time and a place where there are certain subjects that we are just not allowed to even talk about or ask questions about. And I don't believe that anything is off the table. I think this is how you find out the truth. When you go to places like that and you have these conversations that, quote, unquote, we're not allowed to have, you learn things. And I think it's incredibly important, especially with something as polarizing and as big of an important topic to talk about, we need to shed light on it. Right? Who better to do this than Dr. Bob Sears? He's been a practicing pediatrician for 25 years. He's written many books, and he is very well versed in this conversation. So I was so excited to sit down with him. It was such an amazing episode. We also wanted to get this out in a timely manner because there is a current measles outbreak happening in Texas right now, and we talked about it. I asked him his opinion on it. My hope is that this episode will ease a lot of fears for parents because, you know, fear is eased by the truth. And you guys know I've talked about this in many episodes. I am a huge proponent for informed consent. I don't believe in telling anyone what to do with their own bodies or with their own children. I just want to get the truth and the facts out to people so that they know everything. They know the risks, they know the pros. They know the consultant. Just so that you can make the best decision for you and your body and for your children. So that is my prerogative with this episode. I loved it. I learned so much. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. And Dr. Bob Sears is just really incredible. He's such a wealth of knowledge. So I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope that you do, too. If you want to take a moment to write and review this. I would so appreciate it, especially for this episode because I can already imagine that I'm probably going to get some really bad reviews on this because this is an incredibly polarizing topic. But I think it's important to get out there. So if you want to take a moment to rate and review, it'd mean so much to me and would help the show. And if you're wanting to share this on Instagram and you're feeling a little courageous, if you want to tag me Real Foodology I try to get back to all your messages and I just appreciate the support so much. So thank you so much. Love y'all. I'm often asked in the DMs what I feed my dogs. I just recently put Butters on this fresh whole food diet from this company called Ollie. I believe if your dog could talk that they would beg for Ollie and I'm happy to report that it's really healthy. They deliver straight to your door, clean, fresh nutrition and they have five drool worthy flavors. And you don't need to be a veterinary nutritionist to know that they're real minimally processed. They're made in US kitchens with high quality human grade ingredients. They contain no fillers, no preservatives, just real food. And you know we love real food around here. Not just for the humans but also for our pets. All you have to do is fill out Ollie's 32nd quiz and they'll create a customized meal plan based on your pup's weight, activity level and other health info. Head over to Ollie. It's O l l I e.com real foodology and use code real foodology to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe. Today. They offer a clean bull guarantee in the first box so if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. I am a huge fan of Manuka Honey. In fact, I've taken it for years because of its antibacterial and antiviral properties. Creamy and honestly the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. What makes it so special? It's ethically produced by master beekeepers in the remote forests of New Zealand and it's packed with powerful nutrients that support both immunity and gut health. The bees collect nectar from the Manuka tea tree and the honey they produce contains three times more antioxidants and prebiotics than regular honey. Not only that, but Manukora honey also contains a special antibacterial compound called mgo. Every single harvest is third party tested for MGO and you can Even scan a QR code to see the results for yourself. Now it's easier than ever to try. Manu Kora, honey, head to manukora.com Real Foodology to get $25 off the starter kit. That's M A N U K-O R A.com Real Foodology for $25 off your starter kit. Dr. Bob Sears, thank you so much for coming on today.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, I'm glad you guys reached out to me because not very media want to talk about this.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, well, you know, it's a heated subject, but what I was just telling you right before we started airing, I have a personal story and I feel very connected to this. And for a long time I was very scared to speak out about this because, you know, I saw what happened with Jenny McCarthy when she spoke out. And, you know, in this entire space and everything we're going to be talking about today, it's largely not quote, unquote, allowed to even ask questions, which with my personality, I immediately go, well, why not? I want to be able to ask all the questions. And it just makes me want to ask more questions. So I'm very grateful that you're here and speaking out. And funny enough, I told you this before we recorded also. But when I came across your work, I sent an email to my publicist and to my podcast producer and said, I really want to get this guy on the podcast. My producer sent me an email back in all caps, and he goes, that was my pediatrician. And then he got clarity later and he said, actually your dad was his pediatrician. And then I guess when your dad retired, then he went and saw you and he was like in college or something. But yeah, it's very funny. So I loved that. And so he was so excited. He was like, tell him maybe he'll remember me, maybe he won't actually. And I got permission to tell him. And this is, I feel like a perfect gateway into what we're going to talk about. So he actually said that when he was a kid, so this would have been with your dad, that he had a vaccine reaction in the office where he passed out and he put a hole in the wall, apparently because his head hit the wall and like put a little dent in the wall. And I made a joke to Drake and I said, oh, well, maybe that was part of the beginning of you starting to see, like, oh, but that was your dad. But I was curious if maybe that started, you know, making questions.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I became aware of vaccine risk when I was in medical school.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So, yeah, There was no aha moment in the office.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay, so you already kind of knew. So I know you've been practicing for 25 years now.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, 27 now, I guess. Yeah.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow. Okay, so can you walk us through a little bit? As a classically trained pediatrician, what started making you question and just start asking questions about vaccines?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I went to medical school in the early 90s and right as I was coming out I was going to go into pediatrics. Two things happened that just sort of raised some red flags in my mind. One was there is a vaccine that the medical community was using in the 70s and 80s and it went into the early 90s called the DTP vaccine and it was an older version of what we use today. And it was causing serious brain injury in a very high number of children. And this wasn't rare. This was actually. I mean, it wasn't common either, but it was. I mean, one in. I don't think they ever figured out how common it was, but it was probably one in several thousand kids were just having these horrible brain injuring reactions and the medical community was covering it up very sadly. And I discovered that in the basement of the Georgetown University Medical School library where all the research was. And so that made me realize, hey, maybe something's going on. I don't know what it is, but for some reason the medical community is capable of covering something up when. When it goes against the grain. And then my own medical community did something that was really stupid. They added the Hepatitis B vaccine to the newborn vaccine schedule and schools mandated it for kids to go to school. And the whole medical community acted like this was a great idea and this was Hepatitis B, which is a sexually transmitted disease. And so there's no way babies are at any risk of catching that. And they don't share IV drug needles with each other either, so they're not going to pass it that way. And so when I saw the medical community advocate and really push Hep B vaccine, I was a brand new doctor just out of medical school. I said, well, that makes no sense to me. And so I decided I better start reading. What else is there that might not make sense that I need to be aware of? Because I'm going to go into pediatrics and I'm going to be giving these in my office. I better know what I'm doing. So that just made me go down the rabbit hole and I never came out.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, well, once you start going down the rabbit hole, you can't really, you can't really unsee a lot of what you see, the hepatitis B1 is really interesting, and I think this is one that wakes up a lot of people. In fact, I remember recently Callie and Casey Means were on Joe Rogan and they briefly talked about this. And I think there were a lot of parents maybe that hadn't fully made the connection until people started saying, yeah, why are we giving newborn babies these shots when they're not even at risk for it in the first place? My question is, and I don't even know if you have an answer for this or anybody does, or maybe it's just money, but why would they put that on the schedule right out of birth?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, two companies made the vaccine and they marketed it to IV drug users and people who were very sexually promiscuous, people who had high risk of sexually transmitted infections, and homeless people. And so they marketed it to those groups of people. And no surprise, no one would show up to get the vaccine. People in those communities wouldn't tend to voluntarily seek out medical care. They might accept it when offered to them and in certain settings. But these two companies had invested, I don't know if it's hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars into developing this vaccine. And they had no clients. And so two of the doctors that developed the vaccines for these companies did some research. I should put research in air quotes, because it wasn't real research. They basically interviewed a whole bunch of people who had hepatitis B adults, and they asked them, where do you think you caught hep B? Did you share IV drug needles? Were you very promiscuous? And one third of these adults couldn't really figure out where they might have gotten it in their memory. They couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation as to why they would be B positive. So the researchers concluded that well, up to one third of adults who are infected probably caught it as children through some sort of unknown exposure. And if we look at how many adults have it, that means it must be about 30,000 children. Let me say that again. 30,000 children are mysteriously being infected with hep B every year. So lo and behold, they published the research. All the doctors loved it. They said, this is a great reason to add it to the childhood schedule. They never, ever confirmed whether or not children really do catch this disease. It was all just supposition based on adults not remembering how they might have engaged in high risk behaviors. And since then, the CDC has downgraded it from about 30,000 to maybe 15,000 children are mysteriously catching hep B, but that just doesn't happen. But that's how they got it on the schedule. They needed, I guess, to recoup their investment, or maybe I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. And maybe they believed their own research and thought they were doing a lot of good and we're going to suddenly save a whole bunch of children from epb?

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And, you know, could they have believed that? Probably not, but I think that's how the medical community looked at it. They believed the research instead of simply reading the research studies and seeing how bogus they were.

[Courtney Swan]

Well, it also sounds like a very genius way to get children into the system early enough to where parents don't see when there starts to be changes in their children. Because if you vaccinate them as soon as they come out of the womb, essentially, if there's any sort of changes that start to happen before their parents eyes, well, they're not going to notice that immediately out of the womb because they just met the baby themselves. But if they wait to start vaccinating them until, you know, they're one or two, they can start seeing the developmental delays that a lot of these parents are talking about. And there's why. So there is this concern, obviously very well known, that autism is linked to vaccinations. And a lot of it is because parents are starting to see developmental delays in their children and they're attributing it to after they go in for their vaccination schedules. So what is your thought around autism and vaccines?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, I still don't know what to think yet. And I want to maybe share a recent story that I just came across in my office that really kind of broke my heart a little bit. It was a new family. They were bringing their two and a half year old into my office for the very first time. And the mom was pregnant with her next baby and they had decided they were not going to vaccinate the next baby. And in the area where I practice, no other pediatrician will see you. So all those families end up at my office by default. And they told me they're worried that vaccines might be risky and they don't want to do anymore. And they had done them on their child already. Their two and a half year old had gotten all the vaccines and they felt like their child was pretty healthy and maybe had a little speech delay. And they didn't really have much worry about their child. They just didn't want to, you know, put their next child at risk of having problems from vaccines. Well, after evaluating this child, I realized that he had autism he was showing very clear signs of autism. And the parents had no idea. They just thought he was a little speech delayed. And they said, well, yeah, he was talking when he was 1. And then, you know, after he was 1, he kind of lost all his words, and he started having some odd behaviors, but we just thought he was a little. Maybe a little off and maybe a little delayed. And now it's a year and a half later, and I'm seeing them, and I see the clear signs of autism. Now, I don't know if vaccines were related to this child's autism. I have no idea. And the parents hadn't really clued in that anything was wrong. But in their mind, they actually think back to that age one, where their child had been pretty healthy and talking and developing and then suddenly lost a lot of those skills. And so I sort of broke the news to the parents and encouraged them and set them on the path to doing some therapies to help their child improve and recover his developmental skills. But they're just kind of floored. And it kind of floored me, I guess, that parents became aware that vaccines have some risk, but sometimes it goes so unnoticed. Kind of think you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, before the show. Sometimes in hindsight, it's so obvious that a child was healthy and then suddenly wasn't healthy. Talking, laughing, playing, social, loving, empathetic one year old, and suddenly they crash and burn and lose it all. And is it coincidental that they're suddenly getting three new vaccines when they're one? And it's really hard to say. So this kind of. This family's story, I could repeat it hundreds of times, if not thousands, that I've talked to many other parents that have told me they were vaccinating. Everything seemed fine, and suddenly their healthy child changed and they lost all their skills. And some extremely severely, like, extremely neurologically injured, and some just very subtly. And I feel like what I think we're gonna see this new administration do is hopefully do better research. Because I can't answer whether or not vaccines are related to autism until they actually do enough research. They haven't done the right research. Doctors will tell you they've done the research, but the only way you can say is if you take a large group of unvaccinated children and compare their health to a large group of vaccinated children, it's never been done. It has to be prospectively done. You can't just review everyone's medical records from 20 years ago. You have to Take a group, you start following them from birth and study them and compare the outcomes 10, 15 years later of an unvaccinated versus vaccinating group. We would have this research if the CDC has said yes. About 10 years ago, when the government asked them to start the research, they asked. The CDC said no, but I'm pretty sure this CDC is going to say yes. So ask me again in 10 years. Sadly, parents need to know today. And my bottom line answer is we haven't ruled in or ruled out the connection between vaccines and autism. Some children seem to obviously develop autism after severe vaccine reaction, all like in one day. That happens to some kids. I've seen it. Some kids, it's more subtle and gradual and not timingly related to vaccines. So such a huge variability. The bottom line is you take a large group of unvaccinated kids, 10,000, 20,000 of them, you should see 1 in 36 of them have autism.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And what happens if we don't see that? What happens if we see autism in one in a thousand of unvaccinated kids or one in 500 and the rate is so much lower than vaccinated kids, then we're gonna have a big problem. It's a long answer, but I think parents today, they need to basically take a pause, do their research, think about it, compare disease risk to vaccine risk, and come out with an understanding of which choice do they think is going to be safer for their child.

[Courtney Swan]

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[Dr. Bob Sears]

Okay. I don't know.

[Courtney Swan]

Did you.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That I. I did. A patient just asked me today, really wanted to ask on behalf of his, his breastfeeding wife who's saying, is it okay. If she drinks Diet Coke while breastfeeding, I'm like, I guess I wouldn't be drinking Diet Coke ever.

[Courtney Swan]

But, yeah, same.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But, you know, I don't know why you can't drink it during breastfeeding. And it must have been because of that pregnancy study.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah. There was a study that came out that said that in utero, if women drank Diet Cokes while they were pregnant, it was specifically in males, which was interesting that males had a higher. There was a higher rate of autism in males for. With women that were pregnant drinking Diet Coke. Well, and so we know that in certain vaccines, when a child has a reaction, what do those reactions look like? Because I know that there's one that's something called encephalitis. Right. Where there's swelling of the brain. That, to me also, again, this is my personal opinion, but I'm just thinking, okay, swelling of the brain, that's going on for a long time, that would cause damage and harm to the brain. So why would that maybe not be connected to autism? What are some of the vaccine reactions that you see in your office or that you know of?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, I think encephalitis is. I think maybe the one that's most important to talk about because it's not rare. The current data we have is that encephalitis occurs in about one in a thousand babies who get their vaccines at two months, four months, and six months. And encephalitis, as you said it, it's swelling and inflammation of the brain, and it can be mild or moderate or severe. And we learned this from that vaccine. I told you, the DTP vaccine, the older version that used to cause such severe encephalitis that it actually turned into encephalopathy, which is where the damage is permanent. So encephalitis is the swelling and inflammation. Encephalopathy is when it turns into permanent damage.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

That's what was happening with the old DTaP vaccine, the old DTP vaccine.

[Courtney Swan]

And can it happen with other things outside of vaccinations, or is this something.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Probably the most common cause of encephalitis is viral infection.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's all over the pediatric community as far as all the different causes, but we knew the old vaccine caused it severely. The new version of dtp, which is the dtap that causes encephalitis in one in a thousand babies. So when you're giving that vaccine at 2 months, 4 months, and 6 months, babies who react that way, they're gonna have high pitched screaming for three or more hours, that's inconsolable. And they might have a fever and then it'll be followed by severe lethargy where they're very limp, they won't feed. Well, that's the most common vaccine reaction we see in babies. And so what the medical community has come to believe now is that, well, that's a pretty normal reaction now because so many babies have that reaction. Instead of trying to think, hey, why do so many babies have this reaction that doesn't seem very healthy for them and it's shifted to, well, if everyone's having this reaction, we might as well just, it's probably normal. So let's just treat it as normal. If you're a parent and you vaccinate your two month old baby and your baby screams nonstop for three hours and maybe has a fever and then becomes extremely lethargic, you call 99% of pediatrician's offices in this country, they'll reassure you, tell you it's normal. Just give your baby Tylenol and your baby will be fine.

[Courtney Swan]

And why should you not give them Tylenol?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, Tylenol might interfere with how your baby detoxifies things, Right?

[Courtney Swan]

So it affects the glutathione levels, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, so, so people worry about giving that, you know, with close to vaccines. I think there isn't, there's not been enough research to really know whether or not there's a negative effect, but it is possible. So if I see a vaccine reaction that I think needs anti inflammatory treatment, I'll give the baby ibuprofen.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And it doesn't have that effect on glutathione. But just the fact that this is happening at two months and then your baby has encephalitis again at four months because you're repeating the same vaccines, then six months does this brain swelling and inflammation cause some low level of harm and then the baby's development slows down and then you do a whole brand new set of vaccines at age one that causes a different type of encephalitis reaction or inflammation in some babies. And then is that kind of the sort of like pulling the trigger on something that causes more severe damage when you kind of set the baby up earlier? That's kind of all the theory. This will be looked at in research. But I think encephalitis is something that's not necessarily going to always lead to more damage down the road. Babies can recover from it. A lot of times it's mild and the Babies are totally fine a week later. But we have to study it to compare. How are those babies doing compared to babies that don't suffer from an encephalitis reaction at 2, 4, and 6 months from vaccines? And I wanted to say something that kind of ties into what you said earlier is doctors are so angry at people like us who are talking about this because they're thinking, well, there's no way it's vaccines. We know it's not vaccines. It can't possibly be vaccines. Our health care we give kids is so great. You have to take all our advice, get every medication, do every vaccine, do everything on time. My problem with that is our country sucks at pediatrics right now. If we had great outcomes with pediatrics, then maybe these doctors would have a legitimate beef with us complaining about vaccines. But RFK Jr. And many other people have pointed out that our kids are sick. That's what the MAHA movement is all about. Our kids are sick. We are doing a terrible job at being pediatricians for two generations of children now. Yeah, if it was getting better, we could say, hey, listen to your pediatrician, but it's not getting better. So I don't know why pediatricians themselves aren't saying, hey, why is everyone so sick? And all these chronic illnesses? And why are all my kids developmental delayed? And why did the CDC just change the developmental chart to make all the milestones occur later? I don't know if you knew that.

[Courtney Swan]

I saw that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So now they expect kids to develop slower than they did years ago. If our kids are getting worse, I think pediatricians need to examine, what is it about our industry that's creating less healthy children than it was 50 years ago. Gotta figure it out. Otherwise people are gonna stop going to the pediatrician.

[Courtney Swan]

You brought up a great point. And it. It comes to another question I was gonna ask you, which is, you know, we're seeing all these kids with rising rates of autism, which we already talked about. We're seeing eczema, psoriasis, allergies, and, you know, peanut allergies. Like, I'm thinking of when I was a kid. I'm 40. When I was in school, I did not know a single person that had any sort of allergy, like peanut allergy or any of that. I was a nanny maybe 10 years ago, and the mom. I was making meals for the children, and the mom said, you cannot bring almonds. You cannot bring peanuts. You can bring. You can't bring any of these in their preschools anymore because there's so many children that have Allergies. Now, my question is, and look, I think it's multifaceted, but just we're. We're specifically talking about vaccines on this particular episode. How would that not be messing with their immune systems that we are loading these tiny little bodies with so many vaccines? In your experience with your children that you're seeing that are. That are getting vaccinated versus the ones that are not getting vaccinated, are the vaccinated kids less unhealthy? Are you seeing more, raise more rates of ear infections, asthma, all of that?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, I am. I am. And the way I've evaluated this is for the first 12 years of my practice, I was vaccinating a lot of my patients. We were doing vaccines more slowly, following what I called my alternative vaccine schedules, where people were doing fewer vaccines, skipping the vaccines that made no sense, but doing the vaccines that did have some sense to them, but going more slowly through the process, but doing some. When babies were 2 months and 4 months and 6 months and 1 year, and my office used to be full of sick kids who are getting a lot of ear infections and sinus infections and pneumonias and allergies and intestinal problems, chronic diarrhea and asthma. I mean, when I think of my practice all those years ago, I was just inundated with tons of sick kids. And I just thought, as a pediatrician, this is normal. This is part of a pediatrician's life. And it was a part of pediatrics I enjoyed the least. It was pretty stressful. But I used to have to prescribe a lot of antibiotics for very serious infections. And so something shifted about 15 years ago, and all my patients started not wanting any vaccines at all. Instead of getting partially vaccinated and following one of my alternative vaccine schedules, they just didn't want anything. And because I was the only doctor in Orange county, in San Diego and la, I'm not the only one. But now I think I might be the only one in Orange County. There's very few of us. They all came to me. So my practice basically changed quickly over a couple years from a largely vaccinated set of patients, although partly vaccinated, to almost no one vaccinated at all. And so the last 10, 15 years, I've gotten to be the pediatrician for all these kids. Yes, kids still get sick. They, of course, will catch the flu and the COVID and colds. But the number of kids that I see get severely sick or actually have to do something is nothing like it used to be. I mean, I'll see An ear infection. I might see two ear infections in a week instead of five in a day. And I'm seeing the same numbers of patients as I used to. It's not like I have fewer patients. If anything, I have more patients, fewer cases of ear infections. I almost never see sinus infections. And people used to get them all the time years ago. Almost never seen pneumonia until the last few months. You've had this big pneumonia?

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, it's been going around like it's been really weird.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. But I see fewer food allergies, fewer intestinal problems, fewer developmental problems. I feel like I see way fewer kids decline in their development to a degree where they have autism. All those things that keep pediatricians busy with all these serious illnesses. I feel like I see a tiny fraction of the volume of those kids than I used to. What I don't know is, do vaccines have anything to do with that? Yeah, I mean, that's really the only factor that's different about kids today in the last 10 or 15 years compared to the kids I've seen in the late 90s and early 2000s is their vaccine steps. That's really the only thing that's changed in the way I've done medicine. So I'd be curious to know if someone did research in my office what they might actually find. Maybe someday we'll do that.

[Courtney Swan]

I really hope. I wish someone would do research.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Well, some people have. People have done that in other offices. Getting vaccinated to unvaccinated kids.

[Courtney Swan]

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[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, but not just the Amish. They've studied other groups of unvaccinated kids and compared them to vaccinated kids in communities and in even in doctor's offices like mine. And they found that to be true, that the rates of all these childhood pediatric disorders are way lower, just a fraction of what they are in vaccinated kids in their own offices. It just hasn't been studied in my office yet.

[Courtney Swan]

It's so wild. And do you see kids that are unvaccinated that have autism?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So yes. Okay, but it's rare.

[Courtney Swan]

That's interesting.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

This one family, they have an older child they didn't vaccinate and the second child, and he totally developed autism. Not a single vaccine during pregnancy or anytime. I've seen it, but it's just not common. And of course I probably sat and talked to three or four thousand families with a child of autism and almost all of them were vaccinated because that's what everyone did back then. Now that I have this population of families in my practice that almost no one's vaccinating again, I can think of, I can probably count on one hand the number of new patients I've seen in my office over all these years lose their developmental skills to the degree where they have autism. So it's, it's an interesting dilemma. I feel like again, it comes back to there's so much we don't know.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah. But we need to be studying it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, my patients, the patients of mine, I guess since it's everybody, they decide not to vaccinate. To them, it's not because they're worried about autism.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

To them it's really they just want to raise their kid more naturally. You know, they don't want to do antibiotics, they don't want to eat conventional foods. They're very careful during pregnancy. They breastfeed for the most part. And for them, vaccines is just one more chemical, one more pharmaceutical intervention that they don't want because they just want to raise a more natural child. Something I call a pharma free child. And to them, again, it's not really about they're worried about autism. They just think their kid's going to overall be healthy in all kinds of ways. If they can reduce the pharmaceutical influence on their child and the chemical influence and all the genetically modified organisms that are in vaccines and all the bouts of inflammation, encephalitis that kids are prone to when they get vaccines, if they raise their kid without all those negative influences, to them, it's less risk and that disease risk that they have to kind of embrace. Like if you raise your kid without vaccines, you have to understand your child might catch a few infections that they otherwise wouldn't have. To these families, that feels like a safer risk than the vaccine risk. And I don't know if they're right or wrong. I'm just here to serve them and be their pediatrician. But I think that's how they view it.

[Courtney Swan]

So let's talk about that. Have you ever seen children in your office severely harmed by some of these vaccine preventable diseases that you know, every parent is really concerned about?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Great. Yeah, great question.

[Courtney Swan]

And we can also talk about measles, but if you want to answer that first and then.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So, no, no. I've never seen a child severely harmed by a vaccine targeted infection in my office in all of these years.

[Courtney Swan]

And Even working for 27 years, I just want to reiterate that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Okay, yeah, in 27 years, no one's been severely harmed. Now the small levels of harm that I've seen from infections are things like a child has pneumonia and they have to go into the hospital for a few days for IV antibiotics. I've seen that where they actually caught the type of pneumonia that you could prevent with a vaccine. I've seen A kid develop a bone infection, they needed to be hospitalized for a few days. Of course, I've sent kids to the ERROR for hydration because they're throwing up from the flu or they got sick from rotavirus, or I had to have one kid with chickenpox going to the hospital for a few days because they had some like funny neurological symptoms. But each one of these cases, they are all fine. They were never rushed to the ER where the ER had to save their life. No one's been in the intensive care unit because the infection was going to come close to killing them. Every person I've had to put in the office for a vaccine targeted infection that they weren't vaccinated for. It's all been manageable and treatable easily and the kids all did fine. So in my 27 years, none of my patients have regretted their decision to raise a kid vaccine free.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And when I tell patients that there's a real big, like sigh of relief, I see on their whole body just kind of like relaxes. They're like, oh my gosh, our other doctor who kicked us out said, are your kids going to be dead in a year if you don't vaccinate? You're literally killing your child if you don't vaccinate. I've seen the complete opposite to be true. Every single one of my patients, many tens of thousands of patients, not a single one has suffered in that way. And so it makes me feel very blessed. And I think it makes the decision, if you're the type of family that really wants to raise a child vaccine free, the risk you're taking isn't zero. I mean, there's some numerical risk of raising a vaccine free child, that your kid could be that first child to suffer or even die from a vaccine targeted disease, which we can talk about next. But that risk, if you think of our whole country, that risk is very, very, very small. And I think parents have the right to know that.

[Courtney Swan]

I mean, this is informed consent. I talk about this all the time on my podcast. At the end of the day, I'm just here for informed consent. And unfortunately, with the realm of vaccines, there is non informed consent happening right now. Parents are largely not being talked to about the true risks of the vaccines. We're just being told 100% effective, 100% safe, and you can't question. If you ask any questions, God forbid you ask, well, can I see the inserts? Half the time they don't even have the inserts. You have to go to the, you Know, website. But it's just. It's so maddening to me because it feels like parents are being forced to make these decisions out of fear instead of out. Out of actual consent. And it's why it felt so important for me to have you come on this podcast, because I want people to know the truth and the facts, and then they can actually make an informed decision based on what they think is best for their child. So let's talk about the measles one, because this one is floating around right now. There's a lot of fear around this. I'm getting a ton of messages from people because there was just a child that died in Texas, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes.

[Courtney Swan]

I want to ask you about this. So I was told that it was a vaccine strain, and I don't know if you even know any of this, but I was told by a doctor friend of mine that it was a vaccine strain and that the kid actually had pneumonia and something else. And then they. They vaccinated him with. Or him or her. I actually don't even know what the sex of the child was. They vaccinated them with the mmr, which is an attenuated virus, which is a live virus. And apparently you're not supposed to give a live virus when you're already sick.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, I haven't heard that yet.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay, so maybe that's not.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I've not seen that officially reported anywhere yet.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay, so then we'll just say that that's not officially reported.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. I mean, timing wise, this is. We're probably like a week after that.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Then. So. So we don't know. But this is something that parents do need to consider. You know, a child did die.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

For about. What. What. As far as what's been reported so far, I was under the impression it was a natural case of measles in a large religious community who was not vaccinating their children. They wanted to raise their kids that way. And if I was a doctor in that area, they could have been one of my patients. And even though the parents kind of in the back of their mind, they understand there's that very tiny risk that someone could die of one of these infections. This did just happen to one child in the United States.

[Courtney Swan]

And it's heartbreaking.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

The last time it happened in the United States from a child was 2003 was the last time we had a child die of measles in the US and an adult died about 10 years ago from a possible case of measles that was never confirmed. But Prior to that, 2003 was the last fatality that we had in a child. So every so often this happens and it will happen again. But the chance of it happening from measles, the best data we have is that the risk of fatality is about one in every 10,000 cases of measles. Right. One in every 10,000. We have about 175 cases every year in our country of measles. Some years it's so low that it's barely like the COVID year 2020, we had 13 cases of measles because everyone stayed up. A few years before that, we had 1200 cases in a year. So it kind of goes way up and down. This outbreak in measles, this outbreak in Texas, there was nothing unusual about it. It wasn't unusually large. It hit a community. And if you have a large community of unvaccinated children, you're going to have a high possibility of, of someone traveling to another country, catching measles, bringing it back to that community, and then it goes through the community, and almost everyone is going to do just fine. And then you can have this rare anomaly where a kid sadly does pass away from it. I did read that, like you said, this child supposedly was already hospitalized with pneumonia and RSV another respiratory infection before they even developed measles. But then the early reports were that then the child then was positive for measles and then passed away. That's all I know. There are theories about. Well, was he just vaccinated? Was it some sort of vaccine strain? It's way too early to even say that. And I don't think that there's any legitimate reports, at least not as of a couple hours ago.

[Courtney Swan]

Well, and it's my understanding, so since it's a live vaccine, that vaccinated children can actually also spread it too. Right. I think there was a, a, a report of this happening. I'm probably going to get the year wrong, but I want to say it was maybe like 2017 or something. Like, I thought that there was a, an outbreak in New York that they had traced back to vaccinated children were actually the ones that were spreading it. Because you can spread it when you have a live virus vaccine, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the general medical consensus on this among most doctors, because I think there is some, some debate is if you get an MMR vaccine, it is live virus, you can actually develop a case of measles from that about a week later, and you can be contagious from that just as you can from natural measles. So that's one way someone who's vaccinated can spread it. Someone who's vaccinated but is not sick, like with measles symptoms, you know, say a year or two later after they've had the vaccine, the chance of them shedding the measles virus is. I don't think it's. It exists. I think that's almost non existent.

[Courtney Swan]

Like, if they had the vaccine and then they were exposed later to it, or.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

No, no. If they have the vaccine, they're not going to be contagious.

[Courtney Swan]

Like, okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Around them, like measles for, you know, like years and years later.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

They would have to actually be symptomatically sick with measles from the vaccine dose, maybe a week later. Then they could be contagious.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes, that's what I mean.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right, right. Okay. But. No, but the main way that vaccinated kids spread measles is because their vaccine didn't work and they catch natural measles and then they're just going to spread it around to other kids, just like a kid who didn't get the vaccine.

[Courtney Swan]

Got it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Okay. That's about 5% of kids who get a measles vaccine. It won't work, and they'll be susceptible to catching measles in an outbreak. If you get two doses of the MMR, it eventually might make you 98% immune to measles. But measles vaccine is never 100% effective. So in every outbreak we have, we always have a small percentage of people who are not vaccinated because they're part of the 2 to 5% where the vaccine didn't work. But you know what else we have in outbreaks is we have adults who were vaccinated, but they've lost all their immunity. And so people kind of argue that the reason we have measles outbreaks is because too many kids are unvaccinated and so we don't have enough herd immunity. Right. The problem with that theory is half of our nation's herd is not immune to measles at all. Every adult, you know, who's probably over 40, their MMR doses they got when they were kids. Those are long gone.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But you're not immune anymore.

[Courtney Swan]

But if you got measles as a kid just naturally, then you would have it for life.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You would have immunity. Yeah.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. So we'll never get rid of measles. We'll always have outbreaks, no matter how many children vaccinate.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Doctors complain and the public health people complain that if for everyone. I just read this today. If everyone would just get their kids vaccinated, we would never see measles. Nothing was further from the truth because all those kids vaccines are going to wear off. They're all going to be susceptible adults and we're going to spread the outbreaks and then the 2 to 5% of kids will also be involved in outbreaks. So we'll never get rid of it.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah. Unless if we went back to what we did when I was a kid, which was had chickenpox parties. I remember my mom literally had me hang out with her friend's kids who had chickenpox so that I could get it and now have immunity for life. And by the way, no one misconstrue what I'm saying. I'm not saying have. Have measles parties. Let me be very clear. But what I do find fascinating is there's a clip circulating online right now. I'm curious if you've seen this. I should have looked up the name of the TV show before. It's one of those Nick at night shows. I think it's the Brady Bunch.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, the Brady Bunch. I saw it. Yeah. Each of the kids got measles.

[Courtney Swan]

They all got measles. Yeah. And they were, they were like, stoked because they were like, oh, good, we're getting it off. You know, we have the immunity now and it's fine. It's going to be a rash and a fever for a couple days. That episode, that seeing that clip actually blew my mind because I've always just heard, like, fear, fear, if you get it, you know, it's. It'll kill you. Like all this stuff. And now I'm starting to see all this stuff circulating around where actually there's a very high vitamin A dose. Right. That you can give for two days, which I want you to talk about. And then also just the fact that it was so normalized when my parents were kids that they would have similarly to the chickenpox parties, where it was just expected that you would get it. And then at that point you'd hope that all the kids got it because then they had immunity and then they'd be done with it.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, no, no, there, there's. There's a worthwhile debate about measles when it comes to naturally occurring herd immunity from natural infection compared to vaccine herd immunity. And I'll just try to go through this really quick, but I think it's worth discussing. So what you alluded to is it was back when the generation, I think, prior to us, really everyone caught measles, Every single child caught measles, and they developed lifelong immune the rest of their lives. So everyone grew up, all those young girls grew up to be moms. So they're immune when they're pregnant, and they pass their immunity to their little babies.

[Courtney Swan]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. So every baby is born immune to measles without ever even catching the infection.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow. I didn't know that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

They're immune for about nine months, and then mom's immunity and the baby wears off. So then the kid's a few years old, and they catch measles, and the cycle continues. You're immune as a baby from your naturally immune mom. And the reason that's important is measles can be very serious for young babies. If a baby catches measles when they're just a few months old and they had no natural immunity from mom, like, no one has natural immunity. Now, that baby could be one of those fatalities or be very seriously sick. So it used to be that all those babies were safe. Now all those babies are susceptible because we don't vaccinate them until they're one. So we've created this susceptible group of infants who could be at high risk of being harmed by measles. So then you vaccinate, you're immune for 15, 20, maybe 30 years. But then your vaccine wears off, you start having babies. Now you're a pregnant mom with no measles immunity, and you're not giving any immunity to your baby. But then you become an older person. You're 60, 70, 80, 90. You have no measles immunity. And measles can hit an elderly person and be very sick for them as well.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So what natural immunity did for our herd is essentially, it protected all the babies and all the pregnant moms when measles is the most risky. It protected the elderly when there's some risk. But kids had to go through the infection, like, to achieve that type of herd immunity. And the price of that, sadly, is about 1 in 10,000 children would die from measles.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So the fatality rate is so low that back then, during the Brady Bunch, it didn't even enter their mind that their kid might be one of the fatalities, because it'd be almost this obscure thing that you'd never hear of. Wow. So that's why no one feared it. As soon as there's a vaccine for something, then suddenly the disease is 10 times worse. Like, we now have a vaccine for RSV. No one was talking about RSV last year and the year before. We've always looked at RSV as this mild disease. Now suddenly you can die from it because there's a vaccine. If you don't vaccinate, you're going to die from rsv.

[Courtney Swan]

Fierce cells.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, fierce cells. And so they kind of overblow the risk of measles and try to spread more fear of it when the reality is almost everyone's going to sail through it just fine. Some are going to be hospitalized, but they're going to be fine. And then very rarely, sadly, like in this case in Texas, the family is going to be suffer that horrible tragedy of a child where they never thought it would happen, but their child was the one. And you know, how do you, how do you deal with that and how do you approach that and how does it each new, each new parent try to make that decision?

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, I mean, look, and, and obviously this goes without even having to be to be said, but any loss of life is tragic. I mean, I've lost both my siblings. I know very tragically how, how it is to lose someone. But you have to be able to zoom out and look at the whole picture here and say, okay, well where, where's the least amount of harm and then where's the most amount of risk? Right. Because unfortunately the, the life that we live is that there's always going to be risk that we're going to catch an infection or we're going to have a horrible side effect to a pharmaceutical intervention. Like it's, you have to wave, you have to weigh those out.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But I want to touch on measles and vitamin A though, because you mentioned it is there because you're not just helpless at the mercy of measles. The reason why children in third world countries die of measles where they do that. The death toll for measles in underdeveloped countries where children are malnourished is horrendous. It's a totally different infection. It's because they're deficient in vitamin A. If you are deficient in vitamin A or very, very malnourished measles is a horrible disease to catch. So here in America, you want to make sure your kid's getting enough vitamin A and either through dosing as a supplement or through foods or both. And if you are not sure, then yeah, you can take any healthy multivitamin that has the RDA value of vitamin A in it. If you are doubly worried, you could actually take high dose vitamin A for Two days. You take this massive dose for two days. I'm not going to tell you the dose in this kind of setting, but you could search it out yourself. If you take two days of high dose vitamin A, that will boost your levels instantly. So that if you're worried about this particular measles outbreak, that will cover your children, it won't prevent infection, but it will make the case of measles that you catch be milder. It'll help prevent complications. So that's what people are talking about. So if you live in Texas or you're around an outbreak, or you ever hear an outbreak is near, you, grab some vitamin A, look up the dosing, ask your doctor for dosing, do the two days of high dose if you want. And if you want to start now on just natural, healthy eating of vitamin A foods, just find that information online. Yeah, start a natural, healthy vitamin. If you find one that you like that has vitamin A in it, that's at least going to do something to mitigate the effects of measles.

[Courtney Swan]

That's good. This is really helpful for people because I've been getting a ton of messages from parents super concerned about the outbreak in Texas. I mean, understandably so. It's frightening what happened and it's, it's heartbreaking.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But, but people have to realize it's nothing new.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes, yes.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Every single year.

[Courtney Swan]

Every year.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Every year. And, and for some reason the media gets out, gets ahold of it and sudden, suddenly everyone panics, whereas they don't realize same thing happened last year, same thing happened the year before that.

[Courtney Swan]

Well, I was gonna say the, the sum reason is that RFK Jr. Is in there now and vaccines are under a huge spotlight and everyone is freaking out and the media and Big Pharma want to use every opportunity to absolutely fear porn you. Yeah, like they want to scare people instead of actually just outlining the true facts.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Do people still listen to mainstream media?

[Courtney Swan]

According to my dms, a lot of people do. But great point, fair point. Most of my audience, and I think it's very fair to say that most of my audience listening is very well informed and they're turning off their TVs and they're listening to alternative media. But it's interesting how the people that don't even watch the traditional legacy media anymore are still getting all of this fear porn, you know, just because it's being spread all over the Internet right now. There was another thing I wanted to ask you, and you were talking about the herd immunity and just the really cool natural immunity that we get when we get it naturally. I read a study recently that said that if you get a natural case of measles and you overcome it, there's some sort of cancer protective mechanism that happens there.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, there is. I don't remember what it is. I don't have that.

[Courtney Swan]

People can look it up.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But that's true of not just measles, but some other infections as well, like mumps. If you go through a case of mumps, you have some protection from certain reproductive cancers. I'm pretty sure chickenpox has some protective effects that way as well.

[Courtney Swan]

I got that as a kid, so.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, it's. And I think that's, that's partly how some of my patients look at it. I think it's. I don't think anyone wants to catch measles. No, but, but they, they do want to catch chickenpox. And you know, no one really wants to catch mumps either. But, but see, something I left out of my herd immunity analogy, and this even is true for measles, is if we don't have vaccines for these infections and everyone catches them during childhood, those are when these infections are the mildest, right?

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So if you look at how nature designed this, assuming you believe that these viruses were created somehow or evolved however they got here, if we have no vaccines, then you're immune to everything when you're born because your mom gives you all her immunity. And then you start catching these infections like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, Covid, the flu. You start catching everything when you're 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 years old. That's when the diseases are almost always harmless. And at their mildest, that's when the child's body is so much better able to handle those kinds of natural viral infections. So that you then don't catch it when you're an older person where it can be terrible. Yeah. And you don't catch it when you're a two month old baby because your mom had no immunity. So you're a baby born with no immunity. You're not catching it then either, when it can be terrible.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so that's kind of an interesting addition to the whole natural herd immunity versus vaccine index. Herd immunity is the age at which these diseases occur in nature. It's almost as if they were designed to exercise our immune systems, give us the infection when it's almost always going to be harmless, give us a more robust healthier immune system, and then help us have a healthier immune system when we're older, are we supposed to do all that or are we supposed to suppress all that with these vaccines? I think it's a legitimate medical and ethical question. Deserves to be examined.

[Courtney Swan]

I totally agree. And do you think there's an argument for the healthier you are, the better off you probably will have in fighting off these infections if you were to get them as a kid?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, of course. Oh, yes, yes, yes. If you eat healthy, if you're, if you're, if you're breastfed, there's all kinds of benefits to fighting off infections. Better if you're a healthy infant. Healthy child and have a nice nutritious start to life. For sure.

[Courtney Swan]

That would be my assumption too. So when you have these conversations with your patients and they're expressing concern and they don't really know if they want to do anything, any of them, Maybe they want to do a couple. Are there some that you would say, you know what, I actually do think that these are really needed and these are super important.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. I never highlight any certain ones specifically, especially I think in a forum like this when I'm talking to patients one on one in the office.

[Courtney Swan]

I would imagine you could individualize it more too, or you could say your kid is maybe more at risk, you know, for that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it used to be that I was a very big proponent of a few of the vaccines because they're infections that could potentially be fatal for babies.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Like vaccines like whooping cough and meningitis and pneumonia and things that a baby could catch and possibly be harmed from. But when I started having all these patients who didn't want those vaccines, they didn't want any at all. And I've never seen anyone harmed by those infections.

[Courtney Swan]

That's interesting.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I kind of started realizing, well, maybe, maybe even the vaccines that I did think are extra important, maybe they're not as important as I thought they are.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It doesn't mean that, that no vaccine, you know, I mean, there's a whole hierarchy. You could put them in order of importance. But is any. Is even the most important one important enough to get? That's kind of the whole question.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Answer. And when I'm one on one with a patient in the office, I'll tell them straight up what I think about, you know, if something's important and worth getting and what's not worth getting. And yes, I just spend my whole day doing that and I enjoy it. And definitely my favorite thing to talk about.

[Courtney Swan]

I love, I mean, I'm loving this conversation. It's so fascinating. So a lot of my, a lot of my friends have been really starting to question vaccines and I, I have a whole camp of friends that are not doing them at all. I have some friends that are doing more delayed schedule. Do you think that there is a benefit in delaying them? Like, do you think that it helps make it to where there's less harm for the children if there is a delayed schedule versus just getting all of them? Or do you think doing the delayed schedule doesn't really matter?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And you said something earlier about this as well, is waiting until your child's older so you can better observe them for side effects and they can vocalize to you and tell you how they're feeling. And the parent told me that the other day. She told me, I'm not vaccinating my kid until she can talk to me.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow. Tell me how she's feeling.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And I thought, oh, that's a very interesting observation.

[Courtney Swan]

Very smart.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So, medically speaking, I don't know of any actual research that's looked at if vaccines are safer when you're older compared to doing them when you're younger. Theoretically, I believe they probably are safer when you're older, but I can't say that with any medical certainty or show you any research. But if you go with the theory that vaccines could be harmful to your nervous system or could cause neurological injury, or could cause problems with your immune system, if you go with the theory that vaccines could somehow harm you, and I call it a theory because every other doctor out there, if anyone's watching this, they're going to feel like vaccines are 100% harmless. They feel like there's never any harm. But, but let's just go with the theory that there could be harm if you're a two month old baby with a brain that's still developing and you're still growing, all your nervous, your nerve pathways and everything's connecting in your brain and everything you do every day grows more brain connections and the whole thing is just growing and thriving and connecting over the first, say three years of your life. If part of that is damaged, then you're exponentially damaging a whole bunch of things that were supposed to connect and evolve from that down the road.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

If you damage that, say when you're 4 years old, I think the damage could be maybe less extremely minimal, minimalized because you've already formed all these connections, your brain's very healthy and you're thriving. And so if there's a little bit of injury, it Theoretically, could have way less impact on you.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But I mean, I've talked to people, though. That one friend of mine, his kid suffered spinal cord paralysis from vaccines, and he was probably. I think his kid is maybe one and a half or maybe at the time. So it's not like he was older, but he wasn't like a tiny little baby either. So sometimes there's these rare things that you could suffer severe harm even when you're older. But I believe your theory is correct. It's possible if you wait to do vaccines later, they might be safer, at least from the neurological injury standpoint. Point.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah. Again, we need research about this. And. And I think it's also important to note, I'm sure this is not a surprise to anyone listening, but I still want to talk about this. So when I was a kid, I was born in 1984. I believe my mom said that. I think my mom thinks that I got around five shots.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Okay.

[Courtney Swan]

And I. It lines up pretty much with about the. The 84 doses. If you look at it now when a child is born. If I was to have a kid tomorrow and I was to go just fully with the schedule and do every single dose. Dose. Let me be very clear. I'm not talking about just like pin pricks, but every single dose. I believe it's at 76 now. Is that right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, it's probably 70. 72. It's probably 76 with the COVID Yeah, exactly.

[Courtney Swan]

When you add the COVID Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

With the RSV, it's probably 77. But, yeah, it's the. The numbers that I've kind of become familiar with is back when. When I grew up in the 70s. And. And you're right. The same with you. In the 80s, you probably got a total of 24 vaccine doses.

[Courtney Swan]

Got it. But it was.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Some of the shots you got were like combo shots. Yeah. Yeah. You probably got a total of about 24 vaccine doses.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Now your whole childhood, your entire 18 years of childhood now by the time you're one, you're given 30 vaccine doses just by the time you're one.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So we used to give spread out over basically 12 years of childhood. You now get more by the time you're one, and then you get the rest. A total of about 76, 77 doses by the time you're done being a child when you're 18. So the schedule is nothing like it was way back then. It's a totally different ballgame. And I don't. I don't get why doctors don't Understand why parents aren't questioning this. Yeah, you haven't done any more safety research. You know, you've never done the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated study.

[Courtney Swan]

Let's talk about both of those. Because when people hear that, they think, well, no, I mean, there, there have been a ton of studies done on safety studies.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

The FDA approval studies are done, and they're pretty large now. Now they're large. Ten, 20 years ago, the sizes of the safety studies were atrocious. Some of them were so tiny that the study they used to approve the flu vaccine for babies involved 30 babies.

[Courtney Swan]

That's insane. That's so small.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Tiny. But some of them, especially now, are pretty large. They involve, say, 20, 30,000 children. But they are studies done by the companies that make the vaccine. They're trying to get it approved by the fda. These are FDA approval safety studies to demonstrate it's safe. Once the vaccine's approved, all safety research stops. And then it's handed over to a group at the CDC that has this big group of 10 million or so HMO patients and they just study their vaccine records and their health outcomes. But there's almost no unvaccinated kids in those. It's not like anyone spends a billion dollars to redo vaccine safety research or say, study the MMR again to make sure it's would pass, you know, the FDA qualifications today. And so no, they, there's not a. There's. There's so little ongoing safety research that I think parents are right to question that.

[Courtney Swan]

They're also not doing placebo studies. Right. Because I've read that they consider it to be, quote, unquote unethical to study unvaccinated children. So they just don't do it at all. And they don't do the comparisons.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You're right. And I think no doctors know that. I think they're totally oblivious to that because placebo controlled safety research is the gold standard in medicine. We're trained that way. That's grilled into us. Never study or never trust any medicine until you look at the placebo controlled safety studies. None of the vaccines we use today, except I believe there's one exception. It might come to me which one it is. Can't even remember which one it is. It's none of the regular ones that we've been talking about. No placebo controlled safety studies. So when you get. And that's why people kind of have a problem trusting the FDA approval safety studies, if that's all there is for us to go on and There was never any placebo groups, inactive placebo groups, used in those studies. The reason I had to qualify that is there is a placebo group. The placebo group is children who get all the rest of the vaccines except for the new one. That's not a placebo group. That is a study group. There's no placebo. And so again, it makes me kind of totally not understand why doctors aren't more concerned about this.

[Courtney Swan]

Also, how can you say that it's unethical when there's an entire subset group of parents that are already doing this anyways? They're already not vaccinating their children. So why don't we just study them? Study them in comparison to the kids?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

We will.

[Courtney Swan]

Thank God.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

The government asked the CDC 10 years ago. They said no. I bet they've already asked the cdc. We have today, and I'm sure, I would imagine they're going to say yes, CDC or the nih. I kind of heard that the NIH might be a better group at studying this than, than the cdc. So we'll see. But they're going to do the research and look forward to seeing those results.

[Courtney Swan]

How much harm do you think the adjuvants that are in the vaccines are doing? I know there's aluminum, there's formaldehyde. But then I hear a lot of doctors say, oh, it's such a tiny amount. Like you don't have to worry about it. Do you think that those are causing harm?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I worry about aluminum. And I mean, you have to spend hours talking about aluminum. But I'll basically tell you what the medical community says. Medical community says you swallow so much aluminum every day in infant formula and breast milk, in foods, in water, in the environment, you swallow so much every day that the amount injected in vaccines is so much lower than that that, that there's no way the, the aluminum in vaccines could cause any harm. That's what they tell you.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

They'll also tell you if you ask, well, is aluminum even harmful in the first place? They'll say, well, yeah, aluminum is a neurotoxin. If you get too much, if you get too much of it, it kills brain cells. So, but they say, but don't worry, what's in vaccines is so tiny, you know, you're compared to what you're ingesting. Now, what researchers know that most medical doctors don't even think about is that almost all the aluminum you swallow passes right out through your body into the toilet. Yeah, 99, 99.7% of it, I believe it's 99 point something percent of what you swallow goes right out of you. That's pretty harmless.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. You don't want to swallow any. But what we do swallow, that's why it's safe to breastfeed with aluminum there. This infant formula, it's almost going to all go right through you.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Every gram or milligram or. We actually measure it in micrograms. Every microgram of aluminum that you inject into your body goes straight into your.

[Courtney Swan]

Body, and then you can't detox it. Right.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You don't detox it.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

So when doctors try to reassure you, don't worry about vaccine aluminum, they're. I don't think they're purposely lying to you because I think they believe it themselves.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But you ask any researcher or anyone that. That knows, you know, basic chemistry and biology, they know we are injecting way too much aluminum into these infant bodies. Starting at day one with your hepatitis B vaccine, you're getting a large dose of aluminum. You get more at 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 12 months. There's aluminum in every. It's not in every vaccine, but every scheduled visit where you're supposed to have vaccines, at least one of those vaccines has aluminum.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Sometimes three or four of them together have aluminum. All of it's going into these little babies. And there's no way that anyone can say that's safe because they have not done research on it.

[Courtney Swan]

And then I'm going back to remembering what you just said a little while ago about how kids, by the time they're one, they get 30 doses, 30 doses of aluminum. It's just like, why? Why is it not okay that we ask these questions? And why aren't more people raising alarm? It seems so common sense to me. You know, it just.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I know. But the good news is it used to be that if you ask these questions, you were, like, the only one in your entire city asking these questions.

[Courtney Swan]

That's true.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Now half the city is asking these questions. Thank God, half the state. You know, 55% of Americans are asking these same questions. Now it's no longer taboo. It's cool to talk about. You can have these conversations on the playground. People aren't going to look at you funny because they'll be like, I was thinking the same thing.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes, exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I'm glad you said it first.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, let's talk about it. And if someone is completely in favor of vaccines, that's okay, too.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You can be best friends.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Kids can play together, everyone hang out. We can all be together. This doesn't need to be the divisive thing. And I think the media and the government succeeded in making it very divisive for many years. And now that's backfired, and now it's brought at least a lot of the country together, realizing that we are no longer going to stand for that. And now so many of us want to know that we're going to find out what the truth is eventually.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes. Yes, I know. I'm so excited about this new administration, particularly RFK Jr. I feel like we're finally going to get some of this scientific studies that we've been. Everything we've been bringing up in this episode. I. I feel confident that we're going to start studying that so we can have the real answers, so we can tell people. Well, actually, the studies say, you know, X, Y and z. Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. And I think. I mean, I'm not part of this administration, but I certainly have been friends and colleagues with some of the people that are involved in the administration, and they're gonna go about this in such a scientific way that no one is there to just end vaccines or get rid of vaccines, because a lot of people in the country want vaccines, and they should have just the same right to get a vaccine as we would have the right to not get a vaccine.

[Courtney Swan]

Vaccine. Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And so I think that our administration is going to take a thorough scientific look. Do the studies rely on experts that know what they're talking about? What I think they're going to do is they're going to clean up who those experts are so that they don't have conflicts of interest, which is incredibly important. That's hugely important. All the doctors making our vaccine policy decisions. I shouldn't say all I will say the vast majority of the doctors that have been making our vaccine policy decisions for the last 50 years have huge conflicts of interest in the vaccine industry. I think that's probably maybe going to be the most beneficial thing that this administration can achieve, is simply putting these decisions in the hands of experts and researchers and scientists and even lay people, you know, that have everyone come together with no conflicts of interest.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And help guide these policies and do the research and we'll come out. I'm very confident we'll come out to be a much healthier nation.

[Courtney Swan]

Me, too. Yeah. We need to get the conflicts of interest out so we can get access to the real data, not the data that is being paid for by the companies that. That are. That are paying for this specific data to be skewed. In one way. So I know a lot of people listening to this are probably gonna be wondering the same question. What. What would you say to the people that say, well, since you're not vaccinating your children, you're putting my children at risk?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Well, my answer is, what do you have to worry about if your children are vaccinated?

[Courtney Swan]

Great point. That's a great point.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Right. So then my next question would be, well, are you worried your vaccines might not work? And they might say, yeah, you know, what if. What if my kid got all the vaccines but one of those vaccines didn't work? Then I would say, well, what if my kid got that vaccine and his vaccine didn't work either?

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Both be in the same boat. Your kid could catch the disease and infect my kid. I could catch it and infect your kid.

[Courtney Swan]

They could also get the disease from getting the actual vaccination and then spread it, right?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

In rare circumstances, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like the decision to vaccinate or not, to me, there's no right or wrong answer. I've heard doctors say that, okay, even if vaccines are risky, even if there are side effects, we all just have to do our part because we got to keep everyone healthy and we got to keep diseases at bay. But the theory is, among parents who don't vaccinate is they actually think their kids are actually healthier and less negatively influenced by all those pharmaceuticals. So they actually think their kids are going to be less likely to spread disease and be healthier and grow up to be. You have less chronic disease. And I say, why don't just let everyone. Why don't we just have both let everyone make their own decisions? And to me, there's no right or wrong decision. To me, what's wrong on both sides would be to mandate your view of the situation. If you think all vaccines should be abolished and you want to try to mandate that on everybody who wants vaccines, that's not fair.

[Courtney Swan]

I totally agree, but so is you.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Want to mandate vaccines for everybody. If someone really doesn't want vaccines for themselves and their children, I don't think anyone has the right to mandate it that way either.

[Courtney Swan]

I agree.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And that's why all of us have gotten so loud, is because states started to mandate these about 10 years ago. Yeah, there's always only, like, two states that mandated them. Every other state was a free state 10 years ago. New York and then California mandated vaccines, and then Maine and Connecticut mandated vaccines. And then a bunch of other states tried and failed because the public started talking. We all got very loud. The only reason we're talking about this is because of the attempted mandates.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

If no state government tried to mandate vaccines, we would all go about our business.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You vaccinate your kid, I'm not going to vaccinate mine. That's fine.

[Courtney Swan]

Great.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Who cares? Nothing to talk about.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Except for people who are suffering from vaccine injury who feel like they're being unfairly ignored. Is that hole that whole group of families that have been very loud for that reason. But the reason I think a lot of us have gotten really loud and active is because of mandates.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Take mandates away. I think we all go back to living our lives and just coexisting in our country together, regardless of your medical beliefs. And I imagine we're going to get there again and none of us in California are going to be quiet until we can get rid of California school vaccine mandates. Yeah, I love New York's not going to be quiet either.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, it's very interesting and it's cool to see all the mamas really like fight tooth and nail for this because I. Yeah, I think it's incredibly. It's imperative. I've seen videos of this online before and I'm curious if you can confirm this. I saw a p. Or actually I don't know if he was a pediatrician, but I knew it was a doctor was saying years ago that he did not. He was not aware actually that his office was making bonuses at the end of the year from the vaccines. And it wasn't until he started allowing some of his patients to not get so many vaccines that he started seeing a financial hit on it. That blew my mind because I just. Are pediatricians making money off of these vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies?

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yes, they are. I will qualify that though by saying I feel like all the pediatricians I know, they're all very good people and they're pretty altruistic and I don't think in their mind they're mandating vaccines in their office for money. Yeah, I don't think they are. They already signed up to be in a profession that's a lower money making than most medical professions. And so I don't think for them it's about money. However, it is also a fact that not all, but some medical insurance companies that contract with doctors will give doctors very large bonuses at the end of the year based on having fully vaccinated children in their practice. And if they have too many unvaccinated children in their practice, they either lose some of Their bonus or all of their bonus. And these bonuses vary, but it's not just a few hundred dollars. It's say I'm a pediatrician, and I'm going to say I'm going to bring in $200,000 in a year. If I have all vaccinated patients in my practice, I might get like $20,000 extra that year.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Not just from the money I made from giving those vaccines, but from bonus. Just magic bonus money that just comes out of nowhere simply for having tons of vaccinated patients.

[Courtney Swan]

So it's probably safe to assume that there could be some doctors out there that are pushing them more their patients to get vaccinated because they'd like to hit their bonuses at the end of the year. And I'm. And let me be clear, I'm not trying to vilify doctors, but I think, think if they genuinely believe that this is the best for their patient and then they also get money, there's a financial incentive behind it from pharmaceutical companies.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah, there is. And not all medical insurances do this.

[Courtney Swan]

Okay.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

But a lot of them do. And you're right. And so I think, you know, I think more and more doctors that are kind of thinking about this in a different way, a lot of us tend to not even work with insurance companies. Companies anymore.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, that's a big one.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, back when I was working with insurance, we were like going bankrupt on the amount of money that insurances would pay me for my services. Just to make a little bit of a living. We had to work really hard to try to make that work. So I can imagine if I'm a pediatrician who works with tons of insurances and I'm just barely making a decent living, but I can make a much better living. That would be very tempting. And it would even be more tempting if I thought vaccines are going to be better for my patients anyway, something. I'm doing them good, I'm going to make more money for it. That's going to turn, in my mind, is going to turn into a mandate in my office. Office.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I'm not going to see you if you're a patient who doesn't vaccinate, which.

[Courtney Swan]

I hear a lot. I've had friends. Yeah. Getting kicked out of their pediatrician because they don't want.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And it's not because these pediatricians are bad people.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's they. They literally think vaccines are great. And some of them might also be thinking, you know what? I. I got to make at least some sort of decent living working with pediatric medical insurance.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And then this is how we're going to do it. It.

[Courtney Swan]

Wow. So my last question is probably something that everyone has been thinking this entire episode, which is, how are you still practicing in California? And I just, like. I want to, like, pray protection over you, because this is like, a wild con. Just this conversation scares me for you.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've been saying these things in public, you know, ever since probably the year 2000. I started practicing it in 1998, but by 2000, I started to get more vocal about it. I mean, it was a tough. You know, I. It's a tough eight years of my life. I basically had to fight against the California Medical Board because they came after me for basically for the type of vaccine advice I was giving in my office. It was very outside the box, and that was super stressful. That was a very difficult many years of not just my life, but my family's life, and my wife, who's the office manager, and she does all the finances. It's a tough time together, but we got through it. And, I mean, my office has gotten so much busier ever since then. I mean, most people who come under the guns of the medical board either have to stop practicing or they lose half their patients or they have to move to a different state, find a new job. My practice exploded and thrived, and because people realize that sounds like the kind of practice they want to go to. If a doctor is going to get in trouble with a medical board because of their alternative vaccine advice, that's where I want to go. And I've had patients tell me they came to my office specifically because of the bad Yelp reviews, because they're probably all, like, vaccine policy.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Oh, thank you for pointing it out to me. Yeah.

[Courtney Swan]

Like, oh, this is the doctor I'm looking for.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, I mean, it's a very interesting years of my life, but I'm not going anywhere. I mean, I'm not going to leave California. You know, people. People need a pediatrician like me to serve them because no one else will serve them. I've had, you know, two or three pediatricians here in Orange county have moved away over the last five years because of this and other things. But, you know, my heart is here and my patients are here, and they need someone to basically be their pediatrician. I feel blessed to be able to do it.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah. I mean, I just have to say, and I'm sure that I'm speaking on behalf of all my audience. I'm so Grateful that you're doing this work, because I know that it's not easy when you're going against the grain and when you have the medical board up your ass, you're getting terrible Yelp reviews, because people don't understand. They're probably trying to take down your business. They probably want to, you know, burn your place down. I mean, people get really. They get really heated about vaccines, and it's not an easy conversation to have. And not only are you having this with your patients, and you're providing a safe place and care for these patients that don't want to do this, but you're also being very outspoken about it, and it takes a lot of courage to do that.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, Yeah, I have to. I just, you know, I. Not only do I enjoy talking about vaccines, I mean, it fascinates me, and. But I feel like, you know, I. It just so all those years ago when I realized there's a conversation to be had.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And I don't know, I just felt like, parents deserve this, and they deserve to, you know, to come to these conclusions themselves and not feel pressured and coerced. And I mean, you. You. You just mentioned, you know, you know, you're afraid to have the conversation. I feel like I said this earlier, people don't have to be afraid anymore to have a conversation.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

It's a totally acceptable topic of conversation at the dinner table.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And.

[Courtney Swan]

Well, it depends on what dinner table you're at, because it gets very heated.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I mean, it can be. I mean, the conversation could also just be, you know what? You vaccinate your kids. I don't want to vaccinate mine. Do you want to still be friends?

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

If they say no, tell them. Yeah, that. That's okay. You know, the. It's. It's just not about right or wrong. It's about. There's two different ways of doing medicine and raising your kids. You know, it's like. Like, you know, Democrats and Republicans can be friends. You know.

[Courtney Swan]

Exactly.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Atheists and Christians can be friends.

[Courtney Swan]

Yes.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

You know, you know, people who are Jewish and, you know, people who are gentiles or, you know, I mean, the Academy Awards we just saw, you know, a Jewish and a Palestinian producer. You know, they co produced a movie together to share their. Both human beings. And so don't let any fear of repercussions or what someone's going to say, stop you from having a vaccine conversation. Because I feel like it's critical and important that that's just one more thing that people can have differences on but still be best friends and be family and not let that divide us.

[Courtney Swan]

Well, in my inclination, and I said this at the very beginning of the podcast, is that if there's a subject that I'm, quote, unquote, not allowed to talk about or not allowed to ask questions about, that is the only thing I want to talk about. Because I want to find out why it has to be so secretive. Why can't we have an open conversation? Why can't we, we open it up to the public, allow all the nuance to come in and let the public decide for themselves. Why does it have to be this like hush hush, control the conversation? I mean, I know why it's largely driven by pharmaceutical, but by money, let's be real. But it's unfortunate that it has become a conversation around something that can drastically change someone's health for the rest of their life. And so that's why I think it's incredibly important to have this conversation and why I wanted to bring you on. Thank you. Thank you so much. Please let everyone know where they can find you, your work, your practice. And then I know you have a ton of books if you want to plug any of them.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

Yeah, I mean, it's all on one website. Drbobsears.com is that flashing across the screen right now? I don't know. Doctorbobsears.com I have videos, podcasts, books. My favorite book I think is just, is basically my, I call it my fictional autobiography about my eight year fight with the medical board.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

And that's on my website and that was very therapeutic to write about. I basically told the story about what it's like to be a doctor in my shoes. If you are interested in reading about how all that went down and how it turned out. But yeah, I have of course the vaccine book and another fictional book about vaccines where I basically tell the life story of a whole bunch of different people and their journey through vaccine discovery and the politics and the science. I don't know, lots of things. You can read my podcast companion podcast to my books. And that's kind of a new thing. Right? But that's fun to do. Yeah, it's all on drbobsears.com awesome.

[Courtney Swan]

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for all the work you're doing.

[Dr. Bob Sears]

I appreciate you too.

[Courtney Swan]

Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Theme song is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to wellnessloud.com see you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.