February 8, 2019 • 12 mins
George Noory and pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas discuss the recent outbreak of measles in the Pacific Northwest among families who did not vaccinate their children, and how parents can decide whether or not to vaccinate against many childhood diseases due to fears linked to autism.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio,
doctor Paul Thomas with us Paul, So we're talking about
the vaccines. Should you should you not? It's a tough
call for a lot of parents. What do you recommend? Well,
I wrote a book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan, and so
I would recommend anybody that really wants to get a
lot of detail on the finer points of why you
(00:24):
might do one now, weight on others, etc. Read The
Vaccine Friendly Plan. It's a complicated topic, right, and very emotional,
and exactly so I think it's important for your listeners
to understand there is no such thing as a completely
safe vaccine. It's a pharmaceutical product. When you inject it,
(00:45):
you're injecting anergens, but you're also injecting toxins, adge events
and things like that, and so there's a side effect
risk profile, and of course there's benefits as well. And
for some vaccines they're very effect even others are hardly
effective at all. And so it's always, in my opinion,
(01:06):
it should be an informed consent process where you are
given the risks and the benefits and then you really
give it some thought where it gets really tricky and
emotions run high. As take, for example, the measles situation.
So we have a measle's outbreak that's not as scary
as the media is drumming it up to be. Nevertheless, theoretically,
(01:28):
and it's not even theoretically, there is a death rate
from measles. So what is that death rate? The CDC
quotes one in a thousand. It's actually more like one
in ten thousand. How do I come up with that number?
Let's go back to nineteen fifty seven, the year I
was born. That's the cutoff year. You were born fifty
seven or earlier, you're immune. We all had measles at
(01:49):
my age. Yeah, and so, and we're immune for life
after that. You probably need to be vaccinated to be immune. Well,
what was the death rate in the Unite estates before
we started vaccinating for measles? It was about four hundred
and fifty cases a year. Well, there was about three
and a half to four million births per year. That
(02:10):
works out because everybody got the measles absolutely. Oh my god,
I remember befoining to school. Everybody, I mean the whole
class got it. Yeah, everybody got the measles. So if
you have four hundred and fifty deaths out of four
million people, that's about one in ten thousand. That's the
same death rates we have for going under anesthesia. And
(02:31):
I think, you know, nobody freaks out about going to surgery.
I mean, of course it's scary and you could die,
and it's but it's at that level of scariness and
I'm not trying to minimize it. If you've lost a
loved one to measles, it's horrific, of course it is.
But the flip side is there's also risks from the vaccines,
(02:51):
and what is that risk. Well, we don't really know
exactly what the death rates are because we have a
very poor system of tracking side effects from vaccine. And
it's very political, isn't it, Paul. Of course it's absolutely so.
There was a good study on seizures. A Danish study
of half a million kids found that one in six
(03:12):
hundred and forty kids would get seizures from the MMR.
Only one point six percent of those seizures were reported,
so to the VERIS system, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System,
and that's the problem. The side effects from vaccines are
horribly underreported. Now, right before we went on break, you
were asking me about autism and vaccines. And here's the thing.
(03:35):
You go to the CDC website and it says categorically
there is no link. However, CDC whistleblower William Thompson, he's
an MD. He was in charge of these study commissioned
by our government to study whether or not there was
a link between MMR and autism. They found a link.
They destroyed the data, but he kept it and became
(03:59):
the whistleblower to say actually there was a link, and
he regretted that they had not followed protocols, etc. Etc.
So we have that evidence that there was a link.
We recently, on full measure, Cheryl Atkinson just January sixth
of this year, exposed the fact that doctor Zimmerman, Andrew
Zimmerman was the star witness for the government on the
(04:24):
case of five hundred families who had autistic kids were
going to try to get compensation from vaccine court. And
he testified in the first case that he didn't see
a link between that child's vaccines and their autism. But
then he went to the DOJ, the Department of Justice
attorneys and said I have seen other cases where the
(04:44):
vaccines did cause autism. They fired him and just took
his quote out of context dismissed all five hundred cases.
So that's sort of the politics of this whole business.
Now I'll tell you my own story. So I've been
a busy p attrition for thirty years. In two thousand
and four or five, six and seven, I was in
a big group pediatric practice in my own patient population.
(05:08):
I had a kid who was normal at one regrets
into severe autism by age two, so one a year
for four years. And the first time you see that
as a pediatrician, you go, oh, it's a coincidence, because
you're being taught there's no link between vaccines and anything.
Second time you see it's like, oh, two coincidences. And
by the fourth time I went to my partners, I said,
(05:29):
I cannot continue to do business as usual. I've been
learning too much about the problems of toxins and vaccines.
Too many vaccines too soon will cause developmental problems through
a process called immune activation. If you overactivate the immune
system in a very young infant, it causes developmental delay issues.
(05:49):
We know that aluminum and vaccines is neurotoxic and we
have aluminium and vaccines at levels that exceed the FDA limits.
So there's problems, right. So I start my own practice,
I gather some data. I start having an incredible experience
which I outline in my book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan.
And so I have seen a huge reduction in autism
(06:12):
by vaccinating differently. And of course that's controversial, just to
throw that on the airways, but I say that because
it really when it comes to something as controversial as measles,
there is some value in having not some there's huge
value in having society largely protected. Well, why are we, Paul,
(06:33):
those fifty seven and earlier immune now from getting the
measles and kids nowadays aren't what happened. Well, when you
get a natural disease, the immune response is much more robust,
so you have lasting immunity and a much stronger immune response.
(06:54):
Now when you vaccinate the measles, vaccine in the MMR
is actually quite effective. When you get one MMR, it's
somewhere between ninety three and ninety five percent effective, and
if you take a booster when you're age four to six,
you can bump that rate up to about ninety eight
to ninety nine percent. We really only need about ninety
percent of the population protected to prevent measles cases from
(07:19):
sort of sweeping the community. So that concept of herd
immunity or community immunity, when you get up to above
ninety percent of the population is vaccinated, that's good enough
to keep measles from taking hold. And in fact, even
in this large outbreak that's happened in my area, the
community is protected. I mean, if you saw the list
(07:40):
of all the places people have been, from the airport
to the major basketball stadium, to tons of offices and
Ikea and all these places, and nobody, not one person
has caught measles from all of those exposures. Why that's
because we have adequate level of protection within the community.
(08:02):
In fact, we know in this country that level is
so good in every state that they've declared measles has
been eradicated from the United States. Now, our measles as
bad as chicken pox or vice versa worse because chicken
pox we started that vaccine in nineteen ninety five, and
prior to the vaccine there were about fifty deaths per
(08:24):
year from chicken pox. So my kids all had chicken pox,
you know, naturally, naturally. Yeah, And when we rolled that
vaccine out, it was actually justified on a financial basis,
not because you know, fifty deaths wasn't enough to justify
the cost, but they justified it by saying, you know,
think of all the parents not having to leave work
(08:44):
to care for sick kids. And so that's how we
justified that program. What's happened, however, is we now have
a hundred deaths per year from shingles, and shingles is
the same virus. It's the chicken pox virus that's been
just living in the roots of people who are either
vaccinated for chicken pox or had chicken pox naturally. And
(09:06):
the shingles story is just going to get worse and worse.
And here's why. Back when my kids had chicken pox,
I was around them, and that acted as a booster
to my own immunity. Right, and you had chicken pox,
I'm sure as a kid exactly, Okay, all had chicken pox.
And then when each each new wave of kids would
get chicken pox, our immunity would be boosted. And so
(09:28):
shingles was a very rare thing. Uh, you know back
can you can you get shingles now? You, Uh, sure,
I could, but I won't, and I'll tell you why.
I being a pediatrician, I still see cases of chicken pox,
so I am naturally being boosted. You know, at least
(09:48):
every year, I'm seeing a case or two of chicken pox.
So every time the viruses around you that boost your
own immunity exactly. But the general public is no longer
be exposed to chick pox because the vaccine has worked
quite well, so chicken pox is now rare. I mean
there's families I wish I could have a chicken pox party,
and I'm telling them good luck because I literally see
(10:10):
just one or two cases a year, and I'm a
busy pediatrician. Whereas you know, back before the vaccine, you
saw chicken pox all the time. Well, what are the
biggest outbreaks of viruses right now? Polio's gone? Right? Oh sure, yeah,
Polio's eradicated from all the Americas, and you know the
(10:32):
big the big things that we still see are of course, influenza,
and as you mentioned, the flu, that vaccine is notoriously ineffective.
Every year, there's hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens sent
into labs to test for the flu. And the on
average there's only sixteen percent are found to be the flu.
(10:53):
So when we doctors have severe cases of what we
think is the flu, in generally less than ten percent
it's actually influenza. And so you know, the whole, the
whole thing, I mean, CDC statistics will will lump influenza
and pneumonia and then they'll say, for example, I think
it was in two thousand and one, they said they
were like sixty two thousand people died of the flu. Well, no,
(11:18):
actually there were only it was mostly attributed to pneumonia
and there were only two hundred and fifty seven that
were flu, but only eighteen cases were actually positively identified
as flu. So you go from sixty two thousand being
reported as the death from the flu in reality, we
only know that it was eighteen. And this is just
something that's going on with their campaign to try to
(11:38):
get everybody to take a flu shot. That whole. That's
one of the least effective vaccines. But the other another
virus that's very hard for little children is RSV respiration
and sitial virus. It causes bronchiolitis, which is a wheezing pneumonia.
Those little babies can get really sick from that one.
(12:00):
And then there's a host of viruses what we call enteroviruses.
Polio is an interovirus, but there are many, many others,
just as there are lots of different strains of the flu.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to Coast
am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio,
doctor Paul Thomas with us Paul, So we're talking about
the vaccines. Should you should you not? It's a tough
call for a lot of parents. What do you recommend? Well,
I wrote a book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan, and so
I would recommend anybody that really wants to get a
lot of detail on the finer points of why you
(00:24):
might do one now, weight on others, etc. Read The
Vaccine Friendly Plan. It's a complicated topic, right, and very emotional,
and exactly so I think it's important for your listeners
to understand there is no such thing as a completely
safe vaccine. It's a pharmaceutical product. When you inject it,
(00:45):
you're injecting anergens, but you're also injecting toxins, adge events
and things like that, and so there's a side effect
risk profile, and of course there's benefits as well. And
for some vaccines they're very effect even others are hardly
effective at all. And so it's always, in my opinion,
(01:06):
it should be an informed consent process where you are
given the risks and the benefits and then you really
give it some thought where it gets really tricky and
emotions run high. As take, for example, the measles situation.
So we have a measle's outbreak that's not as scary
as the media is drumming it up to be. Nevertheless, theoretically,
(01:28):
and it's not even theoretically, there is a death rate
from measles. So what is that death rate? The CDC
quotes one in a thousand. It's actually more like one
in ten thousand. How do I come up with that number?
Let's go back to nineteen fifty seven, the year I
was born. That's the cutoff year. You were born fifty
seven or earlier, you're immune. We all had measles at
(01:49):
my age. Yeah, and so, and we're immune for life
after that. You probably need to be vaccinated to be immune. Well,
what was the death rate in the Unite estates before
we started vaccinating for measles? It was about four hundred
and fifty cases a year. Well, there was about three
and a half to four million births per year. That
(02:10):
works out because everybody got the measles absolutely. Oh my god,
I remember befoining to school. Everybody, I mean the whole
class got it. Yeah, everybody got the measles. So if
you have four hundred and fifty deaths out of four
million people, that's about one in ten thousand. That's the
same death rates we have for going under anesthesia. And
(02:31):
I think, you know, nobody freaks out about going to surgery.
I mean, of course it's scary and you could die,
and it's but it's at that level of scariness and
I'm not trying to minimize it. If you've lost a
loved one to measles, it's horrific, of course it is.
But the flip side is there's also risks from the vaccines,
(02:51):
and what is that risk. Well, we don't really know
exactly what the death rates are because we have a
very poor system of tracking side effects from vaccine. And
it's very political, isn't it, Paul. Of course it's absolutely so.
There was a good study on seizures. A Danish study
of half a million kids found that one in six
(03:12):
hundred and forty kids would get seizures from the MMR.
Only one point six percent of those seizures were reported,
so to the VERIS system, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System,
and that's the problem. The side effects from vaccines are
horribly underreported. Now, right before we went on break, you
were asking me about autism and vaccines. And here's the thing.
(03:35):
You go to the CDC website and it says categorically
there is no link. However, CDC whistleblower William Thompson, he's
an MD. He was in charge of these study commissioned
by our government to study whether or not there was
a link between MMR and autism. They found a link.
They destroyed the data, but he kept it and became
(03:59):
the whistleblower to say actually there was a link, and
he regretted that they had not followed protocols, etc. Etc.
So we have that evidence that there was a link.
We recently, on full measure, Cheryl Atkinson just January sixth
of this year, exposed the fact that doctor Zimmerman, Andrew
Zimmerman was the star witness for the government on the
(04:24):
case of five hundred families who had autistic kids were
going to try to get compensation from vaccine court. And
he testified in the first case that he didn't see
a link between that child's vaccines and their autism. But
then he went to the DOJ, the Department of Justice
attorneys and said I have seen other cases where the
(04:44):
vaccines did cause autism. They fired him and just took
his quote out of context dismissed all five hundred cases.
So that's sort of the politics of this whole business.
Now I'll tell you my own story. So I've been
a busy p attrition for thirty years. In two thousand
and four or five, six and seven, I was in
a big group pediatric practice in my own patient population.
(05:08):
I had a kid who was normal at one regrets
into severe autism by age two, so one a year
for four years. And the first time you see that
as a pediatrician, you go, oh, it's a coincidence, because
you're being taught there's no link between vaccines and anything.
Second time you see it's like, oh, two coincidences. And
by the fourth time I went to my partners, I said,
(05:29):
I cannot continue to do business as usual. I've been
learning too much about the problems of toxins and vaccines.
Too many vaccines too soon will cause developmental problems through
a process called immune activation. If you overactivate the immune
system in a very young infant, it causes developmental delay issues.
(05:49):
We know that aluminum and vaccines is neurotoxic and we
have aluminium and vaccines at levels that exceed the FDA limits.
So there's problems, right. So I start my own practice,
I gather some data. I start having an incredible experience
which I outline in my book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan.
And so I have seen a huge reduction in autism
(06:12):
by vaccinating differently. And of course that's controversial, just to
throw that on the airways, but I say that because
it really when it comes to something as controversial as measles,
there is some value in having not some there's huge
value in having society largely protected. Well, why are we, Paul,
(06:33):
those fifty seven and earlier immune now from getting the
measles and kids nowadays aren't what happened. Well, when you
get a natural disease, the immune response is much more robust,
so you have lasting immunity and a much stronger immune response.
(06:54):
Now when you vaccinate the measles, vaccine in the MMR
is actually quite effective. When you get one MMR, it's
somewhere between ninety three and ninety five percent effective, and
if you take a booster when you're age four to six,
you can bump that rate up to about ninety eight
to ninety nine percent. We really only need about ninety
percent of the population protected to prevent measles cases from
(07:19):
sort of sweeping the community. So that concept of herd
immunity or community immunity, when you get up to above
ninety percent of the population is vaccinated, that's good enough
to keep measles from taking hold. And in fact, even
in this large outbreak that's happened in my area, the
community is protected. I mean, if you saw the list
(07:40):
of all the places people have been, from the airport
to the major basketball stadium, to tons of offices and
Ikea and all these places, and nobody, not one person
has caught measles from all of those exposures. Why that's
because we have adequate level of protection within the community.
(08:02):
In fact, we know in this country that level is
so good in every state that they've declared measles has
been eradicated from the United States. Now, our measles as
bad as chicken pox or vice versa worse because chicken
pox we started that vaccine in nineteen ninety five, and
prior to the vaccine there were about fifty deaths per
(08:24):
year from chicken pox. So my kids all had chicken pox,
you know, naturally, naturally. Yeah, And when we rolled that
vaccine out, it was actually justified on a financial basis,
not because you know, fifty deaths wasn't enough to justify
the cost, but they justified it by saying, you know,
think of all the parents not having to leave work
(08:44):
to care for sick kids. And so that's how we
justified that program. What's happened, however, is we now have
a hundred deaths per year from shingles, and shingles is
the same virus. It's the chicken pox virus that's been
just living in the roots of people who are either
vaccinated for chicken pox or had chicken pox naturally. And
(09:06):
the shingles story is just going to get worse and worse.
And here's why. Back when my kids had chicken pox,
I was around them, and that acted as a booster
to my own immunity. Right, and you had chicken pox,
I'm sure as a kid exactly, Okay, all had chicken pox.
And then when each each new wave of kids would
get chicken pox, our immunity would be boosted. And so
(09:28):
shingles was a very rare thing. Uh, you know back
can you can you get shingles now? You, Uh, sure,
I could, but I won't, and I'll tell you why.
I being a pediatrician, I still see cases of chicken pox,
so I am naturally being boosted. You know, at least
(09:48):
every year, I'm seeing a case or two of chicken pox.
So every time the viruses around you that boost your
own immunity exactly. But the general public is no longer
be exposed to chick pox because the vaccine has worked
quite well, so chicken pox is now rare. I mean
there's families I wish I could have a chicken pox party,
and I'm telling them good luck because I literally see
(10:10):
just one or two cases a year, and I'm a
busy pediatrician. Whereas you know, back before the vaccine, you
saw chicken pox all the time. Well, what are the
biggest outbreaks of viruses right now? Polio's gone? Right? Oh sure, yeah,
Polio's eradicated from all the Americas, and you know the
(10:32):
big the big things that we still see are of course, influenza,
and as you mentioned, the flu, that vaccine is notoriously ineffective.
Every year, there's hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens sent
into labs to test for the flu. And the on
average there's only sixteen percent are found to be the flu.
(10:53):
So when we doctors have severe cases of what we
think is the flu, in generally less than ten percent
it's actually influenza. And so you know, the whole, the
whole thing, I mean, CDC statistics will will lump influenza
and pneumonia and then they'll say, for example, I think
it was in two thousand and one, they said they
were like sixty two thousand people died of the flu. Well, no,
(11:18):
actually there were only it was mostly attributed to pneumonia
and there were only two hundred and fifty seven that
were flu, but only eighteen cases were actually positively identified
as flu. So you go from sixty two thousand being
reported as the death from the flu in reality, we
only know that it was eighteen. And this is just
something that's going on with their campaign to try to
(11:38):
get everybody to take a flu shot. That whole. That's
one of the least effective vaccines. But the other another
virus that's very hard for little children is RSV respiration
and sitial virus. It causes bronchiolitis, which is a wheezing pneumonia.
Those little babies can get really sick from that one.
(12:00):
And then there's a host of viruses what we call enteroviruses.
Polio is an interovirus, but there are many, many others,
just as there are lots of different strains of the flu.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to Coast
am dot com for more
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