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The Dr. Josh Axe Show
The Vaccine Debate | EXCLUSIVE Interview with Pediatrician Dr. Joel Gator Warsh
01:16:26
We’ve been told the science is settled, but what if we’re not asking the right questions?
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- [00:00]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Nothing has ever shocked me more in my life than when you actually go through the vaccine research. When it comes to autism, when you actually go look, there is nothing. There is no research on vaccines and autism at all.
- [00:10]
Dr. Josh Axe
This is a chart of the United States measles mortality rate. Very, very high. Okay, here in the early 1900s. And then we see here it's sort of dropping significantly around 1920s, down, dropping all the way through the 1950s. And then vaccine, the main vaccine was introduced around 1963, 1964, you can see there, it was already very, very low. What are your thoughts on this?
- [00:32]
Dr. Joel Warsh
My position has always been that we should be able to talk about everything, right? And we shouldn't have the word vaccine being censored. But as a pediatrician, it was the one thing I just couldn't talk about outside the office, which is crazy.
- [00:42]
Dr. Josh Axe
Are there side effects or potential side effects with vaccines? What is your belief on that?
- [00:47]
Dr. Joel Warsh
We don't have a great understanding of the side effects, especially long term side effects.
- [00:52]
Dr. Josh Axe
The average child in the US is getting at least 57 doses, but in many cases 80 to 90 cumulative shots. In Japan it's around 12. In Sweden, it's around 10 to 12.
- [01:05]
Dr. Joel Warsh
If there's a gold medal for giving the most vaccines, America gets it.
- [01:09]
Dr. Josh Axe
My belief about vaccine and autism is this.
- [01:11]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I really hope that we will move forward in the future with more of that attitude and this lifestyle first and not taking this well. It's just our, it's just our genetics. It's just happening. We're just noticing it more. But it was always like that and oh, we're always this obese and oh, there were always this many kids that had autism. No doing it. Our lifestyle is doing it. And we also have the power to change it.
- [01:51]
Dr. Josh Axe
Hey, everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to show. Well, today I've got a great show. We're going to be diving into the truth about vaccines.
- [01:58]
Dr. Joel Warsh
We're going to.
- [01:59]
Dr. Josh Axe
Are vaccines connected to autism, asthma and allergies or is the research clear that there are absolutely zero side effects? Well, today I'm bringing in one of the world's leading researchers and doctors. He's a pediatrician, he's an expert in epidemiology. Dr. Joel Warsh. He wrote a new book called Between a Shot and the Hard Place. And today we're gonna be answering or diving into those deep questions around are there any side effects to any vaccines? What should a vaccine schedule look like? What are they doing in countries like Japan and Sweden versus the United States? We'll dive into all that and more. Hey, Dr. Joel, welcome to the show.
- [02:33]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Thanks for having me on.
- [02:34]
Dr. Josh Axe
Well, I've been really looking forward to this conversation because I felt like for so many years we weren't allowed to have the conversation. And I was telling you about when I used to run my functional medicine practice years ago locally in Nashville. I would do lectures every year on vaccines, vaccine safety, what people need to know. Because I had so many parents coming to me and asking me, hey, should we get shots? Should we not get shots? Which one should we get? And so I would do lectures on this and talk also about natural immunization. And I want to start off here saying I'm actually a fan of immunization from a natural standpoint. You know, your body being better able to adapt and fight off certain types of infections and even things like seasonal allergies. But the way that we've sort of gone about doing this today has been in our typical medical model, create something synthetic, you know, put that into the body and see if the body can deal with it. In, you know, in.
- [03:31]
Dr. Joel Warsh
In.
- [03:31]
Dr. Josh Axe
In create a greater immunity. But a lot of people have questions about are there side effects or potential side effects with vaccines. What. What is your belief on that?
- [03:40]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess going back to like it, it has been really frustrating that we haven't been able to talk about this. I mean, my position has always been that we should be able to talk about everything, right? And we shouldn't have the word vaccine being censored. But as a pediatrician, it was the one thing I just couldn't talk about outside the office, which is crazy, right? We should be able to talk about it. But I never really did, and, And I got so frustrated, and I think so many people did. And especially in the last few years with COVID I think that kind of pushed people over the edge to ask more questions and to be a little bit more open. And we're seeing things change where I feel like we can talk about it now, which is great. And there's a lot more discussion, which is really important because, like you mentioned, so many parents have concerns around side effects. And I feel like we've been taught forever. I mean, I was taught as a doctor, like, safe and effective. Safe and effective. That's what we always said. And, oh, you know, vaccines, one in a million civilians, side effect, like, that's kind of the general mantra, which I don't think that's true. I really think that we don't have a great understanding of the side effects, especially long term. Side effects. I think we have a pretty good idea in terms of the short term side effects, but I don't think we have a really good handle on the long term side effects. And I actually don't think we know it's not really studied in any deliberate way, especially when we're talking about chronic disease autoimmune conditions. And that's why it's important to start talking about this because I don't think it was as big an issue before. Were much more worried about infections and now we see this chronic disease epidemic and it's reasonable to say are vaccines related to that in any way? But I just don't think we're aware of that at this point that modern medicine would say no, but that's not really based on really great data.
- [05:19]
Dr. Josh Axe
So, so, so, so, so your belief right now is, is that the research is not out. We haven't done enough research, which is sort of crazy because I think the thing that we tend to hear from a lot of people in the medical establishment is no case is closed. You know, there's been so much research done and we know with beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are zero side effects with vaccines. And that's the stance that most MDs take.
- [05:41]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, and that's what I was taught. And I mean, I think it's important to understand that when you go through training, what you are taught isn't really about safety. Right. You really learn about, okay, here are the diseases, here are the vaccines, here's the schedule. The risk in terms of severe side effects is very low. So go do it. And you just do. You don't really question it, you just, that's what you learn. And you're told over and over again that these diseases are so horrible, these vaccines are magical. We don't have these diseases anymore because of how amazing these things are. So here's your schedule and go make sure every kid gets it. And you don't think to question that. And so I think as a medical community, doctors put vaccines such on a pedestal that any discussion around any sort of issues they want to push back. Because it's like these are the best things ever. We, we, we got rid of smallpox, we don't have polio really anymore. So why would we even look into these things or, or question these things? And so now we're, we're kind of sitting here on the other side where a lot of those diseases we don't see anymore, which is good, but we never really question how they're affecting us long term. And so, yes, we do a lot of research, but most of that research is pre licensure and most of those studies are very short term. Like you might do them for a couple weeks, maybe a few months, maybe if you're, they do it for one or two years. And most of that's even just self report. There really isn't any research. Following things long term, following things for five or 10 years, following things prospectively, looking at kids that are vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. So you don't have any of that research to really be able to make a definitive statement. Are these things causing or contributing to any sort of long term complication? We just, we don't know. We have some research, mostly retrospective is mostly looking backwards. And the research really is pretty mixed. So it's not, it's not very clear that it's one side or the other. I mean, it's very clear that it's not obvious when you look at it. And I was very surprised when I looked into it myself.
- [07:41]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah. You know, there's a couple of things I want to hit on here with, with, with vaccinations. And the first one is, were the vaccines really the thing that caused, or the primary thing that caused a lot of these illnesses, specifically childhood illnesses like measles? Is that what caused them to decline? Is that the single biggest thing? Because I have a chart here and I just want to show you. I know you've seen this before.
- [08:02]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Oh, yeah.
- [08:03]
Dr. Josh Axe
So this is a chart of the United States measles mortality rate. Okay. And you actually see here, it dropped it very, very high. Okay. Here in the early 1900s. And then we see here it's sort of dropping significantly around 1920s, down, dropping all the way through the 1950s. And then vaccine, the main vaccine was introduced around 1963, 1964, you can see there. And it was already very, very low. What are your thoughts on this?
- [08:31]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Right. So I think it's a very important conversation because the modern medical establishment says, you know, vaccines are this thing that saved us. Right. They were, they were this amazing product that stopped all of this disease. And people were dying at such high rates. And then we brought in these vaccines and now we're not dying anymore. And when you see graphs like that, they're usually mortality graphs. And so when you definitely look at mortality, there's no question that a lot of the disease, a lot of the mortality was significantly reduced before vaccines ever hit the market. And that's true of almost every single vaccine. So you can look at any graph of any of the diseases. And you see the mortality rate from these diseases has plummeted well before vaccines came on the market.
- [09:11]
Dr. Josh Axe
So, and I actually read a, not a study, I've read an anecdotal observation that said there are certain areas of the world where vaccines weren't introduced until much, much later than this. And they had measles, they had tuberculosis and some other issues, and they went down to zero without vaccines.
- [09:33]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Right. And so what you have to look at when you look at those graphs is, number one, you're looking at mortality. So they went down significantly. If you're just looking at cases or like infections and pneumonia, morbidity, basically like side effects of the disease, there was still plenty for a lot of diseases like these, there's still plenty of cases in the 1960s, but the mortality went down. And that's because we were just healthier. We had better nutrition, we had better sanitation, we had antibiotics, we had hospitals. We have just better health care in general. So the severity of a lot of these diseases plummeted and even the, the, the incidence of the prevalence. So it was going down before. Now, for many of these diseases, when the vaccines came out, if you look at the graph in terms of morbidity, they still plummeted after the vaccine. So for, for most epidemiological professionals, they would say both things. If you look at it like for real, both things had an effect. The disease went down well before with, with sanitation and nutrition, but then the vaccine still had an impact in terms of morbidity to the point where you got rid of most of these diseases. Now the question is, never had a vaccine, would it still go down to near zero? That we don't know for sure because we did have vaccines. But you can look at things like tuberculosis and rheumatic fever, other things where you might not have a vaccine, and you still see those go down to near zero without a vaccine. So it's really hard to know. If you, let's say you had a tuberculosis vaccine that you gave everybody in America, would you credit the vaccine with really seeing those rates plummet or would it be just because it was going to happen anyway? So we don't really know.
- [11:07]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah.
- [11:08]
Dr. Joel Warsh
But I think one good example from our childhood is looking at chickenpox. Right. There were tons of cases of chickenpox when we were kids. Everybody basically had it. Then the vaccine came out. You don't really see it anymore. So I think that there is something to say that vaccines have impacted kids getting a lot of these diseases.
- [11:24]
Dr. Josh Axe
Agreed.
- [11:25]
Dr. Joel Warsh
But I Just don't know that.
- [11:26]
Dr. Josh Axe
Is that a good thing?
- [11:27]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Well, and that's the question is, do you? Just because you can make a vaccine doesn't mean that you should. And do I want kids to get measles? No. But we have to weigh the pros and the cons. And I think this is where the important questions that we're not asking come in. It's not about just protecting against this disease. The question is at what cost? What long term risk do these things bring, especially in combination. And that's not an unfair question because we want the least disease with the least side effects. So both things can be true. And I think we have to ask those questions. And it shouldn't be woo woo or out there or controversial to say, hey, what kind of complications are happening from these things? And is some of that worse than the actual things that we're preventing against? We have to talk about that.
- [12:10]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, some of my, I think philosophically, the way that I've treated patients and the way that I've seen really good results with patients over the years is due to my philosophy of we have an amazing body with an amazing capacity to heal. And if we get it in the right environment and we nurture the body correctly, it can fight off these diseases on its own and not get other long term issues like cancer and a number of other chronic diseases. And some of this comes down to, there is Louis Pasteur, who developed the germ theory, believed that it's bugs that make us sick. Well, there was one of his counterparts, a man named last name Bashamp basically said, no, it's your environment that actually makes you sick. And I think that this is really the core difference between the conventional medical community and the holistic natural medicine community is this idea between Pasteur and Beachamp that germs make you sick versus Beachamp said, no, you're just having germs show up primarily because you've got trash there. Right? Because your body is sick. And if you get your body healthy, your own body has the capacity and power to kill off these viruses, infections, even parasites, and a number of other issues. And so when I think about an issue like chickenpox today, I did great with chickenpox. Every kid, a classmate I had did great with chickenpox. And I believe after they beat it on their own, their immune system got stronger for it. And the focus there was, you know, let's eat healthier foods, let's, you know, spend more time out in the sun. Let's just do some things to naturally strengthen the Body from the inside out versus the idea there. I think with conventional medicine is, no, let's treat things from the outside in. And part of it is it's not allowing your immune system to fight its own fight. So it never gets better at fighting. What are your thoughts on sort of that, sort of those sort of philosophical differences between mainstream medicine and more natural?
- [14:11]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, and that's the way that I generally think. I think both things could be true. And I. I'm 100% sure that your environment affects our health and our immune system. I don't think that's controversial in any way. I mean, I think if you are healthier, we see it, you look at that graph like people got healthier, the immune system got stronger, we learned what vitamins were, you know, we were eating food. And so most of these diseases, the mortality rates went to almost zero. So I think that's true. Now the question is more from a public health perspective, because I think there's still this battle right now between generalized public health and the individual health, which what you're saying is very true. Like, I think if we can get everybody to be healthier, to eat better food, to have fresher food, to exercise more, do all those things, we're going to strengthen immune systems and most people will be able to handle something like measles. But if everyone is unvaccinated and measles goes through the entire population, right now, there are a lot of people that are not that healthy. We saw that with COVID And so you do get a lot of side effects and even some severe side effects. And we've seen it with some kids. They have died, you know, in the last year or two. And there's debate about the reasons why, side effects and pneumonia. But the point being, it's still possible, it's still possible to get very sick from some of these diseases. And so I think that that doesn't mean that we should necessarily give everyone a vaccine. We have to discuss those things.
- [15:26]
Dr. Josh Axe
Let me ask you this. When it came to Covid, do you think we would have been better off in terms of overall health and mortality rates if we would have treated Covid like we did via an injection and ventilators and those things, or if we would have treated the co infection instead, or the actual underlying, you know, other disease? Right, because you saw this. You know, we saw this with if you were obese, if you were diabetic, if you had immunodeficiency, if you had a number of issues, like it's something like 94, 96% of the people that died via Covid, they had a, it was a comorbidity issue.
- [16:06]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Well, I, I think if you want to step back and live in the best possible world, if we had of before COVID or during COVID made everybody healthier, that would have done better. Like if we would have improved our environment, if we'd improve our comorbidities, obesity, diabetes, I think we would see a lot lower death than that's what the world saw.
- [16:24]
Dr. Josh Axe
But I want to stop there because here's my thought is that even if it wasn't before, even if it was right at the moment, if rather than we would have gone and given a shot, let's say everybody's getting 10,000 IUs of vitamin D a day, everyone's getting 3,000 IUs of vitamin D. And maybe that's not, maybe that's not possible in our current world.
- [16:42]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Well, but I think the answer to your question is if we had have done those things, it would have been better whether you vaccinate or not vaccinate, we would be healthier. The outcomes would have been better. The question from I guess a public health perspective for somebody who's making vaccine decisions is, well, people are not doing that. People are not healthy. Is this vaccine helping those people? And that's I think a tougher decision. But the discussion, and I think one of the big failures was this is something that should have really sparked the debate about our general health because it's, it's something that we need to talk about. If everybody was healthier, we might not need a vaccine. Covid might not have been so bad. We might not have seen the death rates that we would have seen. Maybe who knows what it would have been. But we should be focusing on those things because that is true of everything. It is true of all the diseases. If you are healthier, you're most likely to do better. And even if you get a vaccine, if you're healthier, you're less likely to have a reaction.
- [17:34]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yes.
- [17:35]
Dr. Joel Warsh
So there's no downside to that part of the conversation. And it can't be this one sided conversation like we saw it during COVID where we're talking about get vaccinated, get vaccinated. And we should have had just as much conversation about, well, here is the information about the vaccine, but we also know that this is really important. So get healthier, here's how you get healthier. Like it should have been equal parts, at least at a minimum. That would have gotten us a lot farther. Even if you are on the side of getting vaccinated, which I don't think most people are anymore. But let's just say at that time, if there would have been equal conversation, we would have much better outcomes over four years.
- [18:09]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, you know, during COVID I was very outspoken about do vitamin D, do vitamin C, do zinc, do quercetin, do nattokinase, all of these things. And I was censored because of that.
- [18:20]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Everybody was.
- [18:21]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, exactly. I wasn't the only one. Many people were at that time. How do you think that that's affected trust? Because here's another thing. Even though we know and you have people like the head of the NIH J, you've got Marty Makery, you've got RFK Jr. You've got so many physicians now, functional medicine doctors, coming out and saying getting these boosters is probably not a good idea. At least right now they've come out with pregnancy and young men saying that. But the fact that the medical organization continues to keep driving and pushing these things forward and not admit any wrongdoing, how much do you think that has caused people to question vaccines even more and started to erode trust in the entire medical system?
- [19:08]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, trust is gone. There's no question about it. You look at the research and the data, before the pandemic, it was 70 plus percent of people trusted medicine and in doctors and hospitals, and now it's under 40%. And these are really huge, huge studies, hundreds of thousands of people. So the trust is gone. And I think we have seen that we have the highest rates of kids that are unvaccinated, the highest rates of requests for exemptions. You look at the COVID recommendations and you know, still as of, you know, recently, still recommended for people to get boosters, but almost nobody's doing it right. You have like maybe 25% of adults, maybe about 10% of kids that were still getting the boosters in the last year. So you have a recommendation that people are just not listening to. There's a huge mismatch between what's being recommended and what people are actually doing. And I think that's a big failure on medicine for not listening. It was a big failure during the pandemic to say things like safe and effective. It was propaganda. And it was like, if we just say it enough times, people will do it. And it made no sense. Like you should be saying something like based on the research and data that we have so far, the benefits seem to outweigh the known risks. It seems like from the research that we've Got that? It decreases your risk of hospitalization, it decreases your risk of death. But we just don't know anything long term. So we recommend it for you, but, but we just don't know the other. And that's fine. Like, that's honest. You don't know the side effects ten years from now. You don't know the side effects of things you haven't seen. And people can be made to get it, they can be recomm to get and they can decide. But as soon as you start forcing anything on people. Yeah, especially something that's, that's, that's new. It just makes no sense. And I think people realize that. They realize that the discussion on natural immunity made no sense. And so now they just questioned everything. And now they're like, okay, well if that's what you're saying about the COVID vaccine, then what about all the rest of the vaccines?
- [20:49]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah.
- [20:49]
Dr. Joel Warsh
And we're now sitting on this other side of the, the pendulum where now there's this complete lack of trust and complete. I just think there's like two different worlds when it's Covid, it's like, oh, you have this medical establishment that says COVID vaccine is great and saved millions of lives and save trillions of dollars. And then you have other people saying it's the worst things ever and it's killing more people than it's helping. And it's very hard as just an average person to know, like, what do you trust? Who do you listen to? How do you trust the CDC when you're seeing all your friends?
- [21:18]
Dr. Josh Axe
Can I tell you, there's a verse in the Bible that Jesus says, and he says, like somebody's asking, how do you know the truth? Or who do I know who to trust? And Jesus says, by their fruit, you will recognize them by their results. By somebody. Like, who do you know who you should listen to for investing advice? Well, Warren Buffett. He's got great fruit in his life. Look at what he's done. So you're listening to those sort of people. And I think it's a similar thing. It makes me. So I used to teach vaccine lectures in my clinic and really dove deep on this. And this is, this was. I couldn't do it online because the stuff would, if a question, anything, it would get banned. So I did a lot of in person lectures and one of the things I remember looking at is the vaccine schedule in The United States vs. Japan in countries like Sweden. So here are these numbers and you're going to be familiar with these, but by the age of 18 in the United States. And by the way, sometimes these numbers differ, and yours might differ a little bit here, but by the age of 18, the average child in the US is getting at least 57 doses, but in many cases, 80 to 90 cumulative shots. In Japan, it's around 12. In Sweden, it's around 10 to 12. So Japan and Sweden have two of the longest, if not the longest lifespan of all countries in the entire world. The US ranks around 49, around 50. Okay. Who do you think we should be following the advice of when it comes to some of these issues? And the other thing about Japan and Sweden is they space them out a lot more and most of them are after the age of two, not before. And so I'm curious your thoughts. I'm sure you've seen this research on the difference between the U.S. japan and Sweden.
- [23:07]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Sure, yeah, definitely. There's no question I made the joke in the book. If there's a gold medal for giving the most vaccines, America gets it. We for sure recommend the most. In general, we have the strongest recommendations. So it's not like physically required, but it's basically required to go to school for most people in America. So of the vaccines that we're strongly recommending, it's by far the highest. Now, when you talk about Japan, other places, first of all, I think we're just very arrogant in America that it's like, we're the best way. We're the only way we know best. There are all sorts of other countries that do all sorts of other things, especially when you look at some of the vaccines, they give them at different times. Not every place requires them. So those numbers are more of the recommended schedule. They still, most of these countries have them all, and most of the kids still get. Get all of them, so that we get very similar rates, but they have a much, much less stringent requirement. In some of these, these, these countries, they certainly have a lot lower numbers than for what we need for school. But they. But still, almost every country in the world has a very similar availability of vaccines. So it's not like we're doing 50 in 12 different ones or 15 different ones, and they don't have them available. Just. They don't require them as much. Yeah, not everybody gets it.
- [24:14]
Dr. Josh Axe
Exactly. And that's one of the things I notice here about Japan and Sweden. Yeah, they're not required.
- [24:17]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah. So the things like hepatitis B are not always required. Chickenpox is not required. Every. So there are a few that we recommend or require in our schedule. That they don't require.
- [24:26]
Dr. Josh Axe
And one of the other things I noticed in Japan is with shots like mmr, if people do get them, they're not all together in one shot. Why would that make a difference? And why would they do that in Japan and we wouldn't do that in the United States.
- [24:37]
Dr. Joel Warsh
So Japan's.
- [24:38]
Dr. Josh Axe
Is there something they know that we don't know?
- [24:40]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I don't know. I mean, it's a weird question because that came up before. So they do the measles rubella, they separate out the mumps. They use a different strain of the mumps, which had a much higher rate of encephalitis than the one that we use. So they pulled it off the market because of those encephalitis. They put it back on which they have the measles rubella and the mumps is just a recommended but not required shot. So they still do it, but they have a different version, a different shot. So I don't know if there's a good reason specifically why their one is better than ours or different. It's just different. And that's just what they do. But they certainly do it later, so that's a big thing. They recommend them later than we do. I think it's 15 months the first one, or maybe it's two years if I'm remembering.
- [25:19]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, I read around two years on there. You know, when we talk about longevity, we usually think about diet, exercise and supplements. But what about your skin? Your skin is your body's largest organ and keeping it strong and resilient is key to how you age, both inside, but even outside. That's why I love Oneskin. Their entire mission is centered on skin longevity and their science backed approach sets them apart from anything else out there. Their OS1 peptide works at the cellular level to improve skin health, reducing the buildup of senescent or zombie cells that contribute to wrinkles, sagging and inflammation. These cells don't just affect your appearance, they actually accelerate your body's overall aging process. Since I started using One Skin, my skin looks healthier, feels stronger, and I love knowing that I'm proactively supporting its longevity at a deeper cellular level. Listen, if you're looking to keep your skin youthful and resilient from for years to come, you've got to check out Oneskin. Go to Oneskin co Axe and use the code axe for 15% off your first purchase. That's Oneskin co axe to get 15% off today. What are your thoughts on I remember and I've done This research over the years in terms of we have these different parts of our immune system that function in different ways. You have an immune system that's more dealing with acute issues like acute infections, like, like a cold or a flu or a basic inflammation response. And then we have the part of your immune system that's dealing with more long term chronic conditions, things like cancer and those. And I know sometimes there's some overlap in what deals with what. But talk to me a little bit about maybe the difference between these immune Systems or your TH1 immune system, your TH2 immune system. And is there any concern potentially even philosophically on if vaccines can maybe cause one to overreact and one to basically react differently over time?
- [27:26]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah. So I think kind of what you're getting at is the immune activation or affecting the immune system in some way, which, going back a little bit again from modern medicine, the basic stance is a vaccine, you're giving it to the body, it's creating an immune response. And that's a good thing because you're just protecting against a virus or bacteria. And it doesn't really cause any sort of downstream negative effects or doesn't really affect the way that your immune system is developing in any way. Because you, certainly when you're born, your immune system's functioning in a certain way. And as you're getting older, things are getting more balanced. And the question is, if you are getting all these vaccines, are you pushing your immune system or affecting your immune system in a way where it's promoting, creating more antibodies and more reactivity and more risk for allergies and autoimmune conditions? Medicine says no, but there's a lot of research and a lot of theory around the fact that maybe because we're doing so many vaccines and we're doing, you know, every couple of months and you're pushing your immune system more towards this immune memory, antibody, B cell, memory, memory cell version that you're creating or promoting for some people, maybe some, some susceptible population, more risk of autoimmune conditions. And I don't think that's unreasonable. I think it's very reasonable. When you look at how the balance between the immune system and the, how it, how it's affected over the first few years, it's not unreasonable to think that maybe we're pushing things towards that, that immunity, which was never meant to be. I don't know. I mean, there certainly is a lot of doctors that take care of patients that are vaccinated unvaccinated. And it seems like the kids that are unvaccinated, don't have as high of a levels of some of these things. It's just not been rigorously studied. So we just don't know. But the doctors that do take care of both all say the same thing, which is the kids that are unvaccinated seem to have lower rates of. Of cold and. And. And flus and autoimmune conditions and asthma and allergies. Doesn't mean that they have zero like some kids still have it, even if they have no vaccines. But it seems like the rates are much lower. But we don't have the evidence to prove that because nothing's ever studied things that way, which is unfortunate. Like, you would think they would have unvaccinated versus vaccinated studies. You would think they would look at databases, and they never did it.
- [29:39]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah. Isn't that crazy? It's crazy.
- [29:40]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Is it crazy or is it done on purpose? I mean, that's the question, right? I think that's the question is, do they not take these? These. Did they not look and realize that the numbers are so different, they don't want to publish that research or just nobody look because we're just assuming that vaccines are safe? I don't know the answer. I don't want to put motive in people's heads.
- [29:56]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, yeah. Well, we know that pharmaceutical companies have strong motives. Listen, there's been time and time again, you look at the largest lawsuits of all time in the United States, and those have been against pharmaceutical companies for lying and knowing that certain drugs have killed people and them still keeping them on the market. So we know there is some level of lack of virtue on the part of certain people that have been operating some of these companies. I remember somebody posing the question many years ago about how prevalent autism is in the Amish community versus not. And I used to take care of a lot of. I grew up in Ohio and anyways, and even now in Tennessee, I took care of a large Amish community. And so we would, you know, see that. And the other one is one. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And another one would be, you know, when I look at the healthiest group of people in terms of a profession that I've seen, and part of this might be a little bit of bias, but I don't think so. I came out of the chiropractic community and the natural medicine and nutritionist community. Okay. Those are like my degrees, my education. And when I look at chiropractors and naturopaths and how many of Them have their kids vaccinated and how healthy their kids are. They have probably the lowest rate, that group of people and probably Amish of all populations. Now, I don't have any data on that. This is just me looking it up. But I think most people, when I say that, they're like, oh, yeah, I know that most chiropractors, most naturopaths, they don't get their kids vaccinated. And I tend to think when I look at the chiropractic kids in naturopathic kids, they're very, very healthy. Generally, of course, you have outliers, right?
- [31:42]
Dr. Joel Warsh
And that's the sentiment that basically everybody who sees both says, so the question then becomes, okay, so those kids are getting fewer of these other conditions. First of all, let's figure if that's true, because it's not that hard to figure out if that's true. And that's really important information because if it actually is true, we need to know that, because you need to find a balance somewhere in the middle. Like, you don't necessarily want nobody to get vaccinated, maybe. And then all these diseases start coming roaring back and then kids start dying of measles or other things. I think that's the medical establishment's concern. But at the same time, no doctor wants to be giving kids asthma or allergies or autoimmune conditions. Like, that's not the point. They just don't realize that that might be a side effect or some sort of. There might be some sort of correlation there. And if it can be proven that that is true, then wouldn't we want to study that and say, hey, okay, we're increasing kids risks of asthma by getting all these vaccines? Why? What ingredient? What's happening? What schedule could we change that? Could we figure out, okay, this is the ingredient that's increasing your risk. This is the part of the schedule that's doing that. Maybe we could change things. Maybe we could remove some of the vaccines, maybe we could space them out more. Maybe we don't need them. Maybe we remove an ingredient or change an ingredient and you want to protect as many kids as you can while decreasing your side effects. There's nothing controversial about that. But if you just assume the thing is safe, you're never going to study it. And companies, they're not going to study their products. Why would a, why would a pharmaceutical company do a big trial now, spend billions of dollars to potentially find a problem with their product, to have to pull it off the market? Like, they're not going to do that.
- [33:11]
Dr. Josh Axe
Exactly.
- [33:11]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Why would they do that?
- [33:12]
Dr. Josh Axe
Exactly.
- [33:13]
Dr. Joel Warsh
We have to do it. The CDC or some sort of organization has to say, we are going to look at these things for safety. We're going to push back. We're going to make sure these things are safe. We're going to make sure that we're doing this the best possible way. And we're not going to be arrogant. We're going to have some humility. We're going to assume that we don't have the best, best vaccines or products that we're ever going to have in humanity, and let's have safer, better products in a decade from now. And we can do that. We can do that, or we can study them and it comes out on the other side. They actually have no relationship to autoimmune conditions and autism and other things. And that is the research that parents would actually want to feel confident to do vaccines.
- [33:51]
Dr. Josh Axe
One of the reasons why I trust you, Joel, is that you're willing to have a conversation about it. And I think about things that I'm passionate about, passionate about, or feel strongly about. I feel really strongly about natural medicine. I feel really strongly about my faith. And if I really care about somebody, what their best interest, and if they ask me about my faith and ask hard questions, I'm actually excited. I want to talk to them about it, I want to explain it, and then I'm also open to hearing their opinion. Because my mind, even spiritually, in terms of certain theological ideas, has changed over the last 15 to 20 years. And the same with natural medicine. But today, when I approach, I remember getting in a debate with a nurse practitioner, this was 10 years ago, and asking some hard questions, and she was so irate and so mad that I would even question or ask a question about it. And that just made me even more so question that person's, what are they hiding?
- [34:46]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Right. It doesn't make any sense that medicine has taken such a hard line with vaccines and there's such a pushback and such an anger when you ask questions and the science has said, oh, this thing has been debunked. And you talk about the craziness of medicine and where we've gone to. Like, you talk about the autism, you talk about autism and vaccines, and there's nothing more crazy or dogmatic than that from both sides. I mean, any sort of problem online, and you talk about autism and everybody just goes, vaccines are the worst thing ever. Vaccines are causing autism. It's the most, the biggest problem. And I've taken care of kids that have Autism, but never had a vaccine. So it certainly can't be the only factor. I think it's very. There are many things that we call autism and there are many factors involved. But at the same time, nothing has ever shocked me more in my life than when you actually go through the vaccine research. When it comes to autism. I was always taught the sciences that things have been debunked. You hear it so confidently discussed. Somebody brings it up, Secretary Kennedy brings it up and what are you talking about? It's been debunked. The CDC website says we have all these great studies. And I thought when I was doing the book. Book that I guess for the book, I mean, really what I wanted to try to do was a very balanced approach and kind of look at both sides and have a discussion. And so for the, for the autism section, what I thought I was going to find was all this research that really good research that showed that vaccines don't cause autism. On great studies, we'd have a lot of them. But I also know, because I've been in this space for a while, that there are some other points of view out there and there are some not as great studies, but there's certainly some things that maybe point to some correlation that have discussed it that kind of are or seen as fringe. I was like, okay, here, here's the, the great research that we have and here's the other side. It's not as settled as people want to make it out, but you know, here's the good research. Why we saying that when you actually go, look, there is nothing. There is no research on vaccines and autism at all. The only things that there is is research on MMR and thimerosal, and thimerosal is the mercury component, which isn't even vaccines anymore. There is no study zero on all vaccines. There's nothing on vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids. We give them all sorts of vaccines in that first year. There are really no studies on hepatitis B, dtap, pcv, rotavirus. There are all these vaccines that we do, and there are no studies that look at them all. There's no prospective trials. It's just mmr. So the reason why people say it so dogmatically is there's nothing that's ever proven that vaccines cause autism definitively. So therefore vaccines don't cause autism. It's this circular weird thinking that doesn't make any sense. They don't have the research. So they said that it's not proven. It's never been actually studied. So we actually have no idea. So you certainly can't say that vaccines cause autism because you'd have to have good research for that. We don't have that. We have very little. We have some okay research on mmr, like pretty good research on that. That's it.
- [37:33]
Dr. Josh Axe
I'll share a couple things with you. One was when I was in full time practice, one of the things that was convincing to me that there could at least be a causative factor was I had this. It was actually a foster care parent and they brought in their child and this was around. The child was just around 1 years old and they brought in the child and we were taking care of them. We did nutrition. This family were working with, they both had diabetics, needed to lose weight, young couple, they were one of these couples where they were in their 20s and they were just very sick. So helping them with their health and they again adopted this child. And at 1 years old, after they were coming in a couple months, they came in once and then the child went from being so like anytime I would look at him, he was so active, so engaging, laughing. And then they brought him in and there was just this glaze over his eyes and he was so. He totally lost that sort of that light and that connection, engagement. And I said, what's happened is. He said, I said something's wrong here. And they're like, well, he just got his, you know, shots a few days ago and they said he hasn't just been been right since. And ever since then in taking care of that family, he never, you know, he didn't break free. That I saw them for another year and there are things like that. And by the way, my story of that one occasion, if you go online, there are actually probably tens of thousands of mobs, more. Okay, maybe more than tens of thousands who have seen that. And the thing I think that I find the most, most frustrating is that most doctors will just write that off and just say that's all in your head or that's not true. And I think that's why so many families out there are really angry, really frustrated or distrusting in the medical community. And you know, the other my belief about vaccine and autism is this, it's not the only factor, you know. And I say this because I think it's very connected to the way that I practice functional medicine. When I have a patient come in with diabetes, diet's a big component, but their genetics is a component. Their cortisol levels from being in high stress environments, that's a Big component. There are loads and loads of other components, and I think it's a combination. Do I think they contribute? I do. But I also think their genetics and their epigenetics can contribute. I think their diet is a part. I think if they've been on antibiotic drugs, I think there's studies on acetaminophen or NSAIDs contributing the toxic load from glyphosate. So I think this is this major cumulative effect and it's just one of those things that's contributing.
- [40:12]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I agree. And I think that the thing that's so frustrating when you step back and when you really look into it is there are just so many stories. Like this same basic story of my kid was, I think, healthy and happy, was developing normally, went in to get their vaccines, and then that afternoon, the next day, things changed. Now, whether that is correct or incorrect, I don't know. Whether it's anecdote or not, we don't know. But when you have thousands of the same stories, hundreds of thousands of the same stories, you should listen to that and take that as data. If you get a vaccine today and you have a heart attack this afternoon, that doesn't mean that you weren't going to have a heart attack anyways. And it doesn't have anything to do with the vaccine. But if hundreds of thousands of people get a vaccine this morning, have a heart attack this afternoon, you damn well better look into the vaccine and say, could it be causing this thing? And it's the same thing with autism. You have the same story with these parents that are called fringe or anti vaxxers if they think it's the vaccine. And you're like, what are you talking about? These people literally took their kid to get vaccines. They're not anti vaxx. They just feel like this is one of the contributors, if not the cause, for their kid. And we need to take that seriously and we need to say this is good information, this is good data. They may or may not be right, but we should not dismiss this when you hear the same thing over and over again, because maybe there is a subset of the population genetic factor which makes you more susceptible. Maybe it's the last step among a cascade of other things that pushes somebody over the edge. Maybe there's something to do with their kidneys or, I don't know, whatever. There could be many things, but there are too many stories that are the same to just call it fringe or crazy. Especially when you look at the research that does not exist and you say it's been Debunked, it's settled. Which doesn't make any sense anyways. But you certainly can't say it about this. And I know that if doctors looked at what the actual research was, they would not think it settled because. Because I did not know this and I very involved in integrative medicine and so I'm talking about vaccines a lot and I did not know what the research actually was until I went to do this book. Because we're told so often that it's so settled, there's so much research and when you go look, you're like, that can't be. It didn't make any sense. Like I did not believe it. I read almost every single book. I read Paul Offit's book and Peter Hotez's book and all these people that are very pro vaccine, they don't have anything more. If there was more, it was would be there. And it doesn't make any sense that they haven't taken any databases, big ones that we have, and said, okay, let's look at the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated kids and see which ones have more autism and how many vaccines you got. How could that not exist? It's so easy to do.
- [42:40]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, exactly. It's not that difficult. And that's why everyone knows that someone's trying to hide something or they don't want to know because it would disrupt their all of the profits coming in via these pharmaceutical companies. And we know the vaccines are what a massive driver and chunk of the entire pharmaceutical industry and what a concern.
- [43:03]
Dr. Joel Warsh
That'S just growing amongst parents. And if you are the medical community, you need that research to say, look, they do not cause autism. Here's the really good prospective study. We've taken 100,000 kids, we follow them forward. We've given this group of kids to wanted to do vaccines, this one didn't. I mean, I know they're ethics, so it's really hard to do it blinded, but you could certainly do it open where people can choose if they want to be vaccinated or not. You can follow them forward and there's still going to be some confounders, but at least you can see kids that are unvaccinated versus kids that are vaccinated. Is there a difference in autism? You could do it very easily. You could certainly do it with databases. None of these studies are perfect, but let's see what it shows because if it doesn't show any difference, that's going to be really good information to give people more confidence but if it does show a difference, again, do we not want to know that? Do we not want to know there is something going on and something to do with vaccines that is contributing to this? Let's figure out what that is. So maybe it's one of the ingredients, but we can change it. Like, why do we want to give kids any sort of condition if we don't need to?
- [43:59]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, yeah. You know, another thing that I thought about with this is that when you look at, even though it's not a traditional vaccine, the mRNA, I know so many young men who got the shot and then developed myocarditis. In fact, my own uncle is in his 50s, completely healthy, no issues, and died because of that. And it was right after his second booster of Pfizer. And so this is something I've experienced in my own family. And here's another thing I know from. And so it's like, if that caused an issue, how can we not even think that maybe there's at least the slightest possibility where we should do research?
- [44:41]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Saw it. We saw it in the last four or five years. Like, all these issues that have come, and it's not fringe. I mean, we know it even statistically, like, it's been proven. Medical establishment. Agreed. Like, it can cause some of these things. So why do we assume that it can't cause other things? Just like with the rest of the schedule, it's been proven to cause seizures, it's been proven to cause encephalitis, inflammation of the brain.
- [45:00]
Dr. Josh Axe
So why Gilliam Barre?
- [45:03]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, it can do these things. Again, they would say, okay, it's very rare and fine, let's assume that it is very, very rare. It's one in a million, 100,000, whatever the number is. Quote, put it, even if it can do it in one in a hundred thousand, if it could do it, why couldn't it do the other things? Just like if you walk by a peanut, for some people, they whiff a peanut, they get a huge anaphylactic reaction. Everybody's different. And so a small amount, even they say it's a small amount, it still could do bad things in your body for you and your genetics.
- [45:28]
Dr. Josh Axe
The peanut's a great example because that was. You literally took my. What My next point was going to be there. That. That. One thing I've learned in functional medicine is I get the best results with personalized medicine. Everybody's uniquely different. I've had people that have been allergic. My sister's allergic to flaxseeds and avocado. Like you know, people are allergic to broccoli and turmeric. I mean, even the healthiest things that God made in Earth for us to just consume via digestive tract in a more natural way, you can be allergic to. So if you're going to inject something completely foreign directly into the bloodstream, how could that potentially not be a problem? Another thing I wanted to mention here, just I think that's kind of an interesting point is. And we can get in this or not, Joel, but, like. And there's probably no research on this, but bypassing mucosal immunity via injection. Okay, so that's not taking the normal path. Again, if everybody think about this, typically the way that we get a viral infection or numerous infections is via, you know, most of the time via our lungs, our cardiovascular system. I mean, that's sort of how it enters the body versus going directly into the bloodstream. Is there any concern there with how these immunizations are administered?
- [46:43]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Well, I talked about this in many different locations in the book, but there's not a lot of great research on it. But I think this is more just common sense. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing as ingesting something as it is injecting it. And that doesn't mean it's necessarily worse. But I think with aluminum is where really the big conversation is, because there are many ingredients that people are concerned. Concerned about in theory. But aluminum is probably the number one concern at the moment. Just because it's a metal and you're injecting it. And a lot of the vaccines have aluminum in it. And with many other.
- [47:10]
Dr. Josh Axe
They still do.
- [47:10]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah. Most of the kid vaccines or many of them have it.
- [47:13]
Dr. Josh Axe
Still have aluminum.
- [47:14]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yes. So they used to have mercury, thimerosal. Most of that was taken out. They do have aluminum. That's an adjuvant. It helps boost the immune response. So for a number of the vaccines that use a protein, so just a small part of it, it doesn't create a robust immune response on its own in general. So they have aluminum in there to make a better immune response because it makes the vaccine work better. So it certainly makes the vaccine work better. The question again is, at what cost? And the. The argument specifically for aluminum is, well, you know, you eat a lot of aluminum. You eat way more aluminum in any given day. It's a natural. Natural in the environment. And so a little bit of aluminum vaccine, just a small amount. So that's the argument. I'm just saying that that's the medical argument that's the kind of standard, standard stance that we have about why it's okay in vaccines. But then if you look much more. If you look more, more closely. I mean, even for aluminum, we have standards, right? You can have 0.2 milligrams per liter in water of aluminum. One vaccine, like hepatitis B has 0.25 milligrams of aluminum. So it's not like it's such an insignificant amount that we can say that the numbers are just so infant, you know, infinitesimally small. But they again, get around that by saying, well, you know, you're drinking a lot of water, you're drinking it all the time. So it's just like one vaccine. It's not very. But that just really doesn't take into account the now cumulative effect of the many vaccines that have aluminum. The kids that maybe don't detoxify. Well, and again, it goes back to your point, which is why I'm coming back to this. It's not the same thing as eating it. You're bypassing the natural immune system. It's going into your blood. It's going to be detoxified in a different way. And we're assuming that it's safe. But I don't think it's unreasonable to question whether just because we say it's kind of safe in our food. Is it, is it the same thing? I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I don't think it's the same. I think it was never. We were never meant to be injected with things. Doesn't mean that all science is bad. I mean, you do protect against things. You were supposed to die of an infection you have. So not all science is bad, but it's not unreasonable to question whether it could cause a side effect in some people or now, because we have many vaccines with aluminum, again multiple times, could there be some cumulative effect? Could we have trouble detoxifying it? Especially if you have a certain genetics or, or kidney issues or whatever it is. So I think your point is reasonable, and that's the kind of questions we should be asking and we should be studying how much is too much. Is it an issue? Because they say, most doctors say, oh, you could have 10,000 vaccines, it's fine. You could have a thousand vaccines, it'd be fine. There has to be some upper limit to how much aluminum you can inject into yourself before it's unsafe. How could that be true? You can't just eject forever aluminum.
- [49:49]
Dr. Josh Axe
So you've probably seen the headlines, Inflation Tariffs, recession. And the truth is, there's a lot to be concerned about. Many economists are warning that a recession could be coming soon. And just like we take steps to protect our physical health, we also need to take steps to protect our financial health. And that's why I'm turning to physical gold and silver to help protect my retirement and savings. Now, I personally trust preserved gold. They can make the process simple and they genuinely care. They're amazing Christian people I really respect. Right now they're offering a free wealth protection guide. And you can get this by just texting AXE. That's AXE to 50505 to get this free guide. Plus you can get up to $15,000 in free gold or silver with a qualified purchase. Don't wait. Text AX to 50505 today and take the first steps towards protecting what you've worked so hard to build. I'm praying for and excited about your financial prosperity. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think for many people, if we could absolutely trust the medical system and we knew that they had our best interest in mind, they were very open to the truth and they were trying to discover what you just talked about just a few moments ago, which was, we want to know if all immunizations are the same level of safety, and maybe this one is a risk and this one's almost zero. And this, you know, like, being able to have that true data and this openness would allow us to, you know, really. Because here's the thing, like, I believe in 90 plus percent of the time that we don't need conventional medicine the way we use it today. I think if somebody's in a car accident, we have the best medical care in the world. It can save your life immediately. But I think today when somebody comes in with type 2 diabetes or obesity or heart disease, the first thing we shouldn't do is prescribe metformin and statin drugs and whatever other sort of drugs we're gonna put with depression. I think we should be focusing on counseling and dietary changes and supplements and herbs and exercise first. And if we still need some help, hey, then let's use a drug. But it would need to happen so infrequently. And that's the model that I think we should be operating under. I had a cousin of mine who had glioblastoma or astrocytoma. It's a brain cancer. And he was given less than a 1% chance to live for one year. And he decided to go completely natural, full ketogenic. And one of the treatments he got was actually something called a dendritic cell vaccine, a form of immunotherapy where they actually removed the tumor from his brain. This was MD Anderson. They then took the tumor and they went and took some of those cells, those cancerous cells and made a vaccine against those cells to then administer in his bloodstream throughout his body doing multiple treatments. And there's some really good research around this. So I actually think that there was a time and a place where, where conventional medicine and these sort of, in certain types might save lives, of course. But, but, but I mean, you know, there's, and so I'm not completely against all medications, I'm not completely against any type of immunotherapy or vaccine. It's just the majority of it I don't believe is safe and effective and we should focus on lifestyle first. And the other thing again my cousin was doing is he was doing a full on healthy ketogenic diet of his like entire diet's like like wild caught salmon and avocados and pumpkin seed butter. I mean that's like you know, in green juices. I mean that's pretty much his diet. But again he used this other therapy and we believe it's going to be beneficial for him.
- [53:36]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, that just goes back to the core of where we, I think we need to go is risk versus benefits. There are some things that could save your life and that's great. And if you could, if you have a serious cancer you're going to die from and they can create some sort of immunization vaccine, therapeutic whatever it is that could save your life. Life. Amazing. Like that's fantastic. That's what we want medicine to do. But we don't want a pill or a medication or a vaccine for everything. Just because we can make one doesn't mean that we should. And just because we have something, you have to weigh the pros and the cons because everything comes at a cost. And I don't think that anybody is against the concept of vaccination. If you could take a magical pill and never get sick and never have a problem in your life and it would never cause you an issue, okay, great, like let's give that to our kids. But that's not how the world works. The real world works by you need to have a healthy body, you need to nourish your body, you need to, to, you know, generally live a healthy lifestyle. And that's going to get you 99 of the way there. And then for certain people, when you're out of balance Usually you need to do these things to get back into balance, but maybe a medication can help you to get there, or maybe you have some sort of genetics or some sort of serious complication where a medication can be helpful. And that's great. That's what medicine's for. But we're so quick to do it now. Yeah. And especially when it comes to vaccines, we just. We have more and more and more, and nobody's taking them off the schedule. Nobody's thinking about risk versus benefits, cumulative effects. And I think we're getting to a point where we're using so many that people are starting to see the concerns around that, and they're not. They're not questioning it. And you talk about safety like that is the research that parents want. I know for sure right now people think it's just about money. They're worried that the pharmaceutical and the medical industrial space is so focused on, we need more, we need to make more money, and they're not worried about safety. And I think if, if we start to bring that back and we start to say, look, we know that everything has a risk, there's probably never going to be a perfectly safe vaccine for every single person. But we are going to look into trying to make these as safe as possible. We're going to take a new approach. We'll have a little more humility. We're going to say, let's look into these things. Let's try to make them safer. Let's look into autism and autoimmune conditions and chronic disease, and let's see how or if they might be related, and let's try to make that better. That's going to make people a lot more confident. But right now, they're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're just saying, do it. It's safe. And people are pushing back on because they know that it's not totally safe. It cannot be. Nothing is. And nobody knows how unsafe it is because we're not doing the research right now.
- [55:54]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah. I mean, can you imagine if the United States would act with a level of humility, which is one of the things I appreciate about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Marty Macri and Jay and the whole group over there is that they are walking forward in this way, even though they're battling all of these people that are so indoctrinated. But if we would go and say, you know what, we're going to do all this research we did, and you know what, in the meantime, let's go and match a country that we know has way better health than us. Let's look at Japan, let's look at Sweden, let's look at these other countries, adopt more of their approach. I mean, how many more parents would probably be willing now since people are so hesitant to go and get them if they knew that my child is going to get eight or 10 that are spaced out over time versus 80? You know, I mean, it would be, it would be, you know, they would build trust. I'm not saying whether I agree with that or not, but generally I think that the trust would be built better than what we're doing now.
- [56:42]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I agree. I think the trust is being eroded. And if we went back to, well, here's our strongest recommendations, here's the things we really think you should get because of X, Y and Z, and here's the issues with those diseases. And this is why recommending these as our top 10 or whatever, there you go. And I, I think that you would start to build trust and you could still recommend the other ones. You could still say, well, we think the benefits outweigh the risks. Here's our schedule and we still recommend it. And people can do whatever they want to do and most people will still do it, but that's going to build trust back. Because it just seems like right now you'd almost be like, oh, let's just do the smallpox vaccine. Even though we haven't had smallpox in like 50 years. We have a vaccine for us. Let's just do it just because. And that seems to be the mentality right now with all these things. Even polio, like, we haven't had polio in a long time. So, you know, does that have to be something a 2 month old gets? Maybe you can give it later. I don't want polio to come back. I don't. People get polio, but like, do you have to do it then? Do we have to do hepatitis B for every kid on day one of life? Like we have a different level of science and technology and understanding that. You could make things a little bit more personalized. You could say, hey, if your parents have hepatitis B, you should probably get the hepatitis B vaccine. That's going to be really protective for you. But for the rest of the kids that have been tested, did do we need to do that on day one?
- [57:46]
Dr. Josh Axe
And how many of these conditions were there because of lack of sanitation and malnourishment? Right.
- [57:53]
Dr. Joel Warsh
We don't even know. We just really don't. But probably all of them.
- [57:56]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah, all of them.
- [57:57]
Dr. Joel Warsh
I mean, they're Obviously all much worse. Some of these things are still around. They're still bad. You don't want to get a meningitis, you don't want a bad pneumonia, you don't want to get polio. Like these things we don't want to get, but they're not around like they used to be.
- [58:07]
Dr. Josh Axe
You know, another thing that sort of bothers me just about, about. And we saw this during COVID This shocked me. I mean, do you remember during COVID when the medical companies actually went and influenced like the dictionary and thesaurus website.
- [58:23]
Dr. Joel Warsh
They changed the words of vaccines and immunity.
- [58:26]
Dr. Josh Axe
Exactly. I mean, we saw this with herd immunity and even immunization. The way that I was trained as a doctor of natural medicine in sort of the natural path, the immunization is, is that there are actually more than one path to immunizing yourself. You have these conventional immunizations. But the most powerful immunizations that lead to long term health are being deeply connected to the earth and the environment and getting those micro exposures. For instance, raw local honey has over 200 different microbes and types of pollen, which have been shown in studies to reduce allergies, reduce asthma, strengthen the immune system over time. So eating from your local garden, I mean, there are studies showing that if you live in Japan, you're better able to digest fish and seaweed because you've built up a certain type of microbiome that can break down those unique peptides and fibers and compounds in those foods. And there's also, and I wrote about this in a book, this is my first book I published called Eat Dirt. And I really talk about if you have a pet, like a dog, if you live on a farm, you know, all of these things cumulatively act as natural immunizations to help your body better able to adapt to some of those foreign invaders or things that you, you might, you know, might have to deal with your environment. This is also why, you know, if you like, I, I went on a trip to Mexico recently and I did not drink the tap water there. Okay. A lot of people were that lived there.
- [59:48]
Dr. Joel Warsh
When you live there, you're adapted to it, I think. So they're okay.
- [59:51]
Dr. Josh Axe
Exactly. They're immune to whatever parasite or whatever sort of microorganisms in the water there. They're not having that reaction to it. And so there are natural way, I think sometimes parents think, think, well, it's the only way to protect my child. When the reality is if you really focus on nourishment and diet and spending more time outside and these Other things, it's a very different way, but it is a way to strengthen up the immune system over time and still protect your kids against certain types of infections.
- [60:19]
Dr. Joel Warsh
And first of all, there's only vaccines against a few things, so you still need to do those things because it protects you against everything else, which is the majority of what you're gonna be exposed to anyway. And even for a vaccine, if you actually get the disease, you have a much stronger, much more robust immunity to that disease in the long run than if you get a vaccine, because you're usually just getting one part. Now, the flip side, obviously, for Benison as well, but the point of getting a vaccine is to prevent you from getting very sick from those diseases, which is true, you could. So. But just the very basics of immune responses, if you're exposed to things naturally, it's going to give you a more robust response. So I think we have to take a little bit of both and kind of an understanding from both sides and fear some of these diseases a little bit less and understand how the natural world and how our bodies are attuned with that and how we don't necessarily need a vaccine or a medication for everything. But we can still understand that modern medicine has a place. And for certain diseases, like maybe for certain people, it is reasonable, or maybe you have other conditions where you really don't want to get a certain disease, so the vaccine makes sense. And I don't think that we should just get rid of all vaccines, but I think we need to understand their place and really understand the risk versus benefits. Again, because if some of these diseases really do have something to do with autism or asthma or allergies, even in part, we need to know that so we can make the appropriate risk benefit analysis. Because for something that you're not necessarily going to see as a child, like, let's say, hepatitis B in those first couple of days, you need to be able to make a risk assessment. If that increases your risk of getting asthma or allergies, and you really don't have almost any risk to get in those first couple months. Like, why are we doing that for kids? We have to know that to make those assessments. And it doesn't mean the hepatitis B vaccine is bad, doesn't mean you want to get hepatitis B, doesn't mean we want that to run rampant, but it might mean that you don't need to do it in the first day. Maybe you do it at two months or four months, or maybe at 10 years old or whatever it is, but you can't make that assessment until you have an acknowledgement that it could cause a problem and figure out what those problems are. If you don't have that risk, you can't know the risk versus benefits. Benefits.
- [62:16]
Dr. Josh Axe
Do you have unexplainable illness, hormone dysfunction, weight loss, resistance, brain fog, and you're tired of being dismissed when you know something isn't right? Well, get my at home testing of targeted biomarkers including hormones, thyroid and metabolism, plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to help you understand your results. The truth is your doctor's probably reading your blood work all wrong. They're missing the cellular issues behind the symptoms. This new testing flip the script. The future of interpreting test results is here. I'm currently offering a simple at home blood test that actually tests for the right things. And just as importantly, it comes with proper interpretation of your results. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now. One of the things I've appreciated about you and just hearing your story, Joel, is that, you know, you stepped into this just wanting to know the truth. I mean, you weren't anti vaxx, you weren't pro, you were just, I want to know the truth. And when I think about some of the people I respect most in the world, that's how they step into things. My respect for someone like Joe Rogan has gone up from this standpoint is that he's open to changing. I mean, he had a very, you know, he had a very strong sort of political stance that changed. He had a strong standpoint. I remember actually again, against Christianity. And now he's going to church. I mean, there are things like that that I'm like, okay, I really respect. He's trying to find the truth. I saw the same thing with Russell Brand. I saw the same thing historically with Christian figures like C.S. lewis. Like, he was an atheist and he's like, I just want to know the truth. I'll go either way, but I want to know the evidence. And that's going. I'm going to allow that to speak to me on that. And you approach this the same way in the way you wrote your book?
- [64:02]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, I literally wrote the book. Not from a pro or anti standpoint. It's just I want the conversation to be had. I feel like we were not able to have the conversation in the debate. The word vaccine was in the shadows. It needs to be brought out. We have to be able to have conversations like this and the information is going to Take me wherever it. I mean, in my office and in the book, I don't tell anybody what to do. I don't feel like we should be telling people what to do. We should be providing information, and then people should make the best decisions for them, like everything else in medicine. And I have people in my office that do the regular schedule. I have people that do a slow schedule. I have some that don't do it. And I think that's up to you. And you should do whatever it is that you want to do, but we should be able to talk about it. And if at the end of the day, 10,000 vaccines is going to make our kids the healthiest, so be it. And if it's zero, then so be it. But we have to be able to take that. I think we need to take that perspective going forward and say, like, is this making us cumulatively healthier or less healthy? And I don't think it's that obvious anymore with this chronic disease epidemic, because if these things are related in some way to this chronic disease epidemic, then you don't see a lot of these diseases anymore. And you can credit the vaccines for some of that. Maybe. But I think that we need to decide how much of a credit do we have to give to the vaccines for these diseases, and then what risk. And you don't want the measles to come roaring back and everybody to get measles. But I also don't want everybody to have asthma, allergies, autoimmune conditions, and autism. So it's both things can be true. And you have to be able to minimize disease. And I said this before, you know, minimize disease, but also minimize these chronic diseases. And we have to know how or if these things are related in some way. I don't think we do.
- [65:32]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah. What are some of the most surprising things that you discovered in writing your book?
- [65:36]
Dr. Joel Warsh
And the autism was by far the number one. I mean, we already talked about that. I think just the research in general, going backwards in time for a lot of diseases is very surprising. I think we feel like we have this robust research on a lot of these vaccines, and we have these vaccines studied in the best way possible, which would be against an inert placebo like saline or saltwater, which is not true. True. We just don't have that research for most of the vaccines, almost all the vaccines in the childhood schedule. So they were mostly studied against an earlier version of the vaccine or an active placebo. So the vaccine minus the antigen and where that comes into play would be something like the dtep, the diphtheria, tennis pertussis. We now have the dtep, acellular pertussis. It was studied against the old one, the dtp, the whole cell, but the whole cell was taken off the market for safety issues issues. That's why we have the new one. So when you're studying the old one versus the new one and you're saying it's safe compared to the old one, but then the old one is pulled off for safety issues, there's a flaw in that research. And now we can't go back and study things against an inert placebo because it's said to be unethical, because these things are so effective that we can't not give kids a vaccine for a trial. So you don't have that research that we would have loved for a lot of these things originally because they just didn't do it back then. They didn't do it in the way that we do research for the older vaccines 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Now we do double back blind control trials, but the companies are not required to do it against inert placebo. And that's what we're getting a lot of discussion with Secretary Kennedy now of wanting that moving forward. There should be no controversy around a new vaccine where there's nothing on the market requiring that they do the best safety research possible before it hits the market, that this should not be controversial. Yes, there's some controversy around the old vaccines that are already on there. But if you're going to create a new vaccine, you should have to study it against an inert placebo for safety before it hits the market. That should be the gold center. That's what I was taught was the goal. That's what I assumed everything was studied against, but it just wasn't. It wasn't studied that way. There are some inert placebo testing for some of the newer vaccines. Some of the vaccines we don't use on the regular schedule, or it was studied for efficacy but not safety, or it was studied after it was already on the market. But almost every vaccine, basically none of the childhood schedules were studied for an inert placebo before it hit the market. And that is crazy that it was not required to do that like you would think that it would be, but it just was not required and it has never been. And why would a company do it if they can study vaccine A versus vaccine biology B, you can theoretically hide a signal because you could say, well, in group A they had 10 seizures and group B, they had 10 seizures, that's equally as safe. But if you did the right study and you had group A versus group B versus group C and group C had an inert placebo and had one seizure, 10 versus 10 versus 1 is very different. That's a very different study. And there's nothing anti science or woo about it. That's the way you do gold standard safety research. And we never did it. And it doesn't mean there's a problem because that might just be what it is. But if we don't do the right kind of research, you don't know, as.
- [68:30]
Dr. Josh Axe
A pediatrician and you counseling families and kids on their health, what are some of the best things that you believe we need to do to support kids in building their immune systems to prevent chronic infections, autoimmune disease, cancer, those sort of things in the future, the two.
- [68:48]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Big things, it's lifestyle, but it's food and toxins. You have to eat healthy food, food meaning fresh local produce that was just picked recently. I think you can't substitute that kind of food for the food that we get in markets these days. I mean, it may not be available to everybody, but at least you want to get the food that has the least amount of chemicals and toxins, the least amount of words, you don't even know what they are. As fresh as possible for wherever you are. Food loses its nutrients if it's traveling, if it's been sprayed in all sorts of chemicals, goals, it's just not the same thing. And we live in such a toxic world that if you can minimize things anywhere, I think that's a good thing. So you just need fresh local food. You need to get outside, get some sunlight, exercise, move, try to decrease your stress. These are not rocket science things, but those are the kids that are the healthiest. I mean, you're living the way that we were always meant to live. We're never meant to live behind a screen. Never meant to eat food that's been shipped from some other country and sprayed in chemicals. And you're eating it three weeks after it was picked or in a package.
- [69:48]
Dr. Josh Axe
It's something that's not talked about that much. How, how much food loses its nutrient density. I mean, you've got toxins that are sprayed on there and a lot of these pesticides. And then with that again, if something's coming in from China or Mexico and you don't eat it for three weeks and then it sits in your fridge, actually in the grocery store a little bit in your fridge. I mean, it's losing likely at least 50% of its nutritional value. I mean, it's really immense and a load of enzymes and a number of other things. So that's a problem.
- [70:12]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Think about if you like go to a farm and you pick something, how long is it going to last for? It's like two, three days and it goes bad. Right. So how can anything you have in the store not have been sprayed in something to keep it?
- [70:21]
Dr. Josh Axe
Well, one of the things, the way that they do it is one is they harvest it really early and, and it's not full, it's not peak nutritional value if you harvest it early. And then the other thing is, to your point is they're spraying things on it to keep it from aging as quickly. So yeah, the nutritional value of the food we eat versus if it's grown in your local gardener, you're just going to your farmer's market. Market. I mean, the reality is now compared to 50 years ago, we have such amazing access to local foods via your local farmers market. And some store chains, you know, source things locally like, I'll give an example, like Whole Foods Market here they have peaches that they just brought in from Georgia here and from even south Tennessee. Just, you know, I, I know that week. And so, you know, so, so it is possible to get some of these right now. There's another just thing I wanted to mention here. Just as we kind of close up and it's this, you know, there are. When I first moved to Nashville, one of the communities I spent the most time with is the autistic community. And a lot of those moms, a lot of those parents had a lot of the kids coming to my practice. And one of the first things I did that I learned is get them on a gluten and casein free diet. And the kids saw great results. And then the next step I took was I started following more of a GAPS diet. And this is really a diet that's full of lots of soups, that follows Chinese medicine principles, traditional principles. And the results were great there too. And I remember having a kid who spoke four words and about four weeks later he spoke 40 words. And his mom was just so, just elated and it was so meaningful to me. And then from there we started doing things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and just a number of things and being able to see major improvements on kids that had certain levels of damage, that were struggling with autism, but also kids with allergies and asthma and adhd. So if you're a parent out there watching this or listening to this, and you've had a child who was damaged by something or has a major health struggle. The body does have a great ability to regenerate itself, especially when you get it in the perfect environment. And so I want to just encourage you to think about some things and know that your body can heal and see good, great, you know, great improvement when you do some of the right therapies.
- [72:37]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And for kids, but also for adults too. I mean, almost every so many people are sick with something these days. And unfortunately, the modern medical establishment seems to make it like, oh, it's just genetics. Oh, it's just the way that it is. Here's a medication and that's what's going to be helpful for you for the rest of your life. And everybody that works in the integrated space says, no, no, no. Like there are things that you could do and we could see major improvements because a lot of what we're seeing is actually chemicals and to toxins and lack of nutrients. And if you give the body those things that it needs, you will start to see things get more imbalanced. And it, it's not often rocket science. You don't need to always follow like a very specific, like a GAPS diet or whatever. I mean, it's great if you do, but the, the basics of it is you're changing up their diet, you're giving them the nutrients that they need, you're giving them better food and then their body's like, oh, great, I have the nutrients now, so I could function a little better. And so it does. And, and, and sometimes it's really helpful to work with a practitioner because again, everyone's different and a lot of people are going to do better on like, no dairy, no wheat. But maybe that's not the thing that's important for your kid, but at least if you're starting to move in that direction, you start to see things really improve. And I really hope that we will move forward in the future with more of that attitude and this lifestyle first and not taking this well. It's just our genetics, it's just happening. We're just noticing it more. But it was always like that. And, oh, we're always this obese. Oh, there are always this many kids ahead. Odd. Autism. No, no, we're doing it. Our lifestyle is doing it. And we also have the power to change it. And you as a parent have the power to make things better and to improve your symptoms and their symptoms. If you focus on these things and you put health first. But we just don't do that anymore. We just faster, cheaper, easier. And that comes at a cost of our health. And we have to go back to prioritizing our health with it just needs to be something where we spend more of our time and more of our money. If you can, can if you want to be healthier because people are just very unhealthy in the modern lifestyle that we have today.
- [74:35]
Dr. Josh Axe
Yeah. Yeah. To your point, I think that's a combination of things. I think for a lot of people it's just a whole, for me, it took a whole mindset shift in thinking about things differently, thinking about medicine differently, nature, differently, thinking about the way God made our bodies and made us to interact and get healthy and immunized via just nature. And so and Joe, I just want say to say I've loved having you on. I am such a big fan of yours and that you are tackling this in a way where you're being unbiased and you're really trying to get to the root of the truth. And I want to encourage everybody to check out Joel's got a new book here. It's called Between a Shot and a Hard Place. This is going to be in many bookstores. It's going to be on Amazon.com so you just run on Amazon.com and get this book right now. Between A Shot and the Hard Place. If you want to know the truth and the research of what's out there, what's not out there. You want to check out this book again here by Dr. Joel Warsh. He's an M.D. he's a pediatrician. He's an expert in epidemiology. And Joel, just so great having you on the show today.
- [75:36]
Dr. Joel Warsh
Thanks for having me on.
- [75:37]
Dr. Josh Axe
All right, everybody. Hey, thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. Remember, each and every week we're diving deep into the science and the principles of how you can heal physically, mentally and spiritually and take your health and your life to the next level. Thank you to all of you subscribers out there. By the way, the number one thing you can do to support this show is subscribe. It allows me to bring on more whole high profile guests like Dr. Joel here. And also thank you for sharing. Listen, there are millions and millions of people who don't know the truth about vaccinations, about immunizations, about just how to be healthy. And so do me a favor, help share this, help get the word out because the world needs to know the truth about vaccines. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you on the next episode.
- [76:22]
Dr. Joel Warsh
It.