Vaccine Arrogance

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There was some frustrating themes coming out of the congressional
testimony that RFK Junior had is committee hearings in front
of the US Senate which were very contentious, and you
had Democrat senators being very upset. Kennedy has been firing
people from the centers from disease Control, and there's this

(00:23):
huge argument from all these people on the left and
the establishment soft right that Kennedy is ruining American is
going to be endangering American health. It's followed up by
in Florida the state government there eliminating all vaccine mandates
for public schools, all vaccine mandates for public schools. And

(00:46):
I feel like there's a very reasonable middle ground, a
very reasonable public health skeptic middle ground that isn't being
carved out enough. Or maybe the Kennedy, maybe Kennedy's tenure
now at HHS is allowing that middle ground of I

(01:06):
think very reasonable vaccine skepticism to be expressed. And my
mom was dealing with this. So my mom's a physician,
she was dermatologist for years and years and years and years.
She goes to a medical conference the other weekend just
for you know, continuing education credits and they had a
panel on vaccines, and the approach of this panel was

(01:31):
just anyone who questions anything about vaccines is a moron,
and that was it. They just bypassed objections, which just
made me think, Look, let's assume that everything about how

(01:53):
vaccines are administered to children today in America. Let's assume
it's all good. Assume actually everything they're doing is good
for kids, and the schedule of introducing vaccines to very
very young kids. Immediately give them an HPV vaccine, do this,
do that, do that, blah blah blah, blah blah. Let's

(02:14):
assume that it's all fine and dandy, that there's actually
no objection to the current model that public health, that
the public health kind of consensus promotes. If you believe

(02:36):
that's true, why would you not try to educate doctors
who have to interact with patients, have to interact with
patients' parents, with children, the parents of children, millions of
whom are very skeptical of this process. Why would you

(03:01):
interact with them with this dismissive attitude that every single
one of them is a moron or a kook, rather
than actually trying to engage with it. This is the
reason people have objections to this or that vaccine being
introduced at this early age. We think it is okay

(03:23):
because of this and this and this, Here is this study,
Here is that study, Here is no I mean, and
this is very mainstream kind of medical conference that my
mom went to, you know, the kind of conferences that
all kinds of doctors go to all the time for
keeping up their continuing education credits. And just the attitude was,

(03:49):
these people are idiots, as if doctors don't have to
deal with people, as if doctors don't have to deal
with real human beings. Now I I dare I am
a little have a little bit of temerity to tread
on this subject at all. Not a doctor, not a
medical person, But I think there's a very solid middle

(04:14):
ground that can be carved out here, a very reasonable
position on vaccines. Was actually one that was introduced, I
remember this during the twenty sixteen presidential debate. Was introduced
by doctor Ben Carson. We all remember Ben Carson, whom

(04:34):
President Trump stuck him as the head of HUD in
the first Trump administration, and Carson and Trump wound up
having this interesting little back and forth during one of
the debates, talking about vaccines, where Carson was sort of saying,
you know, yeah, I could see that the vaccine schedule
we give to kids, that we are loading up kids

(04:59):
with all the vaccin scenes super early, and that maybe
this would be better off being spread out more over time.
And people have pointed out that you're to load up
kids at a very early age infants with vaccines, You're

(05:20):
introducing to a very naive metabolism, all these different influences,
and so yeah, people are going to raise questions when
the only sort of outside metabolic or you know, the

(05:43):
sort of influence that a child has had on his
body or her body was you know, it's a newborn baby,
hasn't been out in the world much. You no, not
a lot of environmental influences that the baby's been subjected to,
not a lot of smug intake, not a lot of this,
not a lot of that, not a lot of drugs,
not a lot of whatever. All this baby has had

(06:03):
it has been breast milk or formula and a vaccine
or a couple of vaccines. If health problems start with
a baby, guess what people are going to jump to
the conclusion that it was because of the vaccine that
whatever problem has arisen, has arisen. Furthermore, there's also this

(06:26):
that I've sort of realized a lot of this with
the hepatitis B vaccine. Okay, there's all this talk about
requiring the hepatitis B vaccine. Hepatitis B is chiefly contracted
by intravenous drug use, but it can be passed on

(06:49):
from a mom. So there's this push now and then
you know, I guess any baby could grow up to
be a person who might contract hepatitis B. If the
baby grows up to be an intravenous drug user, Yes,
this baby will get could get hepatitis B. Now that

(07:11):
they test the moms for hep B to see because
it's during childbirth that this could be transmitted to the baby.
They test moms who are pregnant to see if they
have hep B. All right, my wife is pregnant. She's
been tested several times just over the course of this pregnancy. No,
she does not have hep BE. Not using a lot

(07:33):
of not a lot of intravenous drug use. Over at
the Girardi House. So you can test moms for hep B,
you can see if they've got it, and you can
immunize babies who you know, proper vaccination and treatment can

(07:54):
significantly reduce the risk of transmission in a situation like that.
Outside of a situation like that, though, there are people
pushing to give babies B vaccination. Just give the baby
a B vaccination, then there's no chance that the baby
will ever get hepatitis B when they grow up. And

(08:14):
there are moms who are understandably like, well, why what
are we doing here? Maybe my baby's not gonna grow
up to be an introvenous drug user. Maybe there's no
real risk that my baby's gonna get appetitis B. Why
why are we giving this newborn baby hepatitis B? And
a lot of the reasoning of it for both, not

(08:36):
just for hepatitis B, for a lot of the front
loading of the vaccine schedule. It all seems to be
this sort of lowest common denominator position that basically so
many parents, like parents who are in chaotic life situations
where they have limited interaction with physicians, that we've got

(09:01):
them now, We've got them right here, right when the
baby's born. They may not come back to the doctor again,
especially if they're poor, if they're in a chaotic healthcare situation.
If they're in a chaotic life situation, so let's get
them a vaccine right now while we've got them. That's

(09:22):
basically the attitude. It's this lowest common denominator attitude. Now,
why would you apply that attitude to, for example, my family.
All Right, we are not lowest common denominator patients. I'm
not tooting my horn saying we're the greatest thing, the
Girardi families, the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I've

(09:44):
got too. Both of my parents were physicians. We are
not anti medicine. My wife takes kids so their pediatrician
appointments on a pretty regular basis. I'd say she does.
She never or fail to get them to an appointment.
I'd say pretty much. Yeah, and that's hard to do
with five going on six kids. Okay, no, they my

(10:09):
wife takes kids to their appointments. They're interacting with physicians,
their dermatologists. Grandma sees them every week. Like, we are
not a healthcare averse group of people. There's no reason
to act towards my wife the same way you might

(10:30):
be tempted to act towards someone you deem to be
in a chaotic life situation who's not seen the physic
doctor at all, and we got them here right now,
Let's get them this vaccine right now. It's this lowest
common denominator approach to to sort of their model for

(10:51):
how you're presenting when you're presenting vaccines. And it's that
attitude that is a big motivator behind give on the
vaccine super early. Furthermore, with all the controversy about hepatitis B,
one one of the sort of astounding things is that

(11:11):
they because they want to do universal vaccination for hepatitis B,
and what they realize is that you've got to vaccinate
seven million people before you've prevented one case of hepatitis B.

(11:34):
That's how many I mean that that's between I guess
the effectiveness rate of the vaccine and how few people
actually get hepatitis B, Like like, that's how many people.
So you're gonna vaccinate six million, nine under ninety nine
nine babies for the hope that you'll get that one
baby who's gonna get a hepatitis B sometime down the road.

(11:56):
It's stupid. So I think has RFK expressed crazy opinions
about vaccines in the past, Yeah, I think he has
I particularly, I just think the vaccines autism link. It's

(12:20):
hard because of how broad the term autism is and
how novel it is to treat this very broad range
of activity of behaviors and mental health states all with
the label autism. Like not all things that we call

(12:42):
autism are the same thing. Like some you know, some
mild cases of autism we would have never classified as
anything medicalized at all. So there's a part of me
that finds some of that Kennedy stuff hard to sustain.
Kennedy has said certain things like that the measles vaccine
killed more people, or I forget which which vaccine he

(13:03):
was talking about. There's some obviously extremely useful vaccae. I
forget if it was polio or something. Where he said
that that vaccine killed more people than the disease, which
was you know, complete nonsense. I mean, people forget that.
All of this kind of real radical positioning when it
comes to vaccines was as recently as twelve years ago

(13:25):
the exclusive domain of ultra rich, granola crunchy lefties who
lived in Marin County. It was not really a right
wing aligned thing. COVID had a lot to do with
flipping that sort of political dynamic where all of a sudden,
liberals were like, you know, ready to pledge allegiance to Pfizer,

(13:46):
you know, a massive corporate behemoth, and you know, it
was it was liberals who were more inclined to be
anti vaxers and not vaccinating their kids. Now, all of
a sudden, that whole dynamic has has flipped in the
last four or five years. So again, I'm not opposed
to the idea of vaccinations. Now, I do have ethical

(14:13):
concerns about certain kinds of vaccines whose testing phases were
developed using cells derived from cell lines that originated from
the killing of a child through abortion, And I think
there's a lot of there needs to be a fuller

(14:33):
sort of ethical consideration of those things, and I think
people need to have sort of ethical options to not
take vaccines in some of those cases. I didn't get
the COVID vaccine in part because of that. It was
sort of I didn't think there was much need given

(14:54):
my health state, especially after we figured out that the
COVID vaccine wasn't actually preventing transmission. So it was, you know,
I'm not really helping anybody, and I was not really
at risk for COVID, so I was not at risk
of very serious health complications from COVID, I should say.

(15:16):
And because of that, and because of the connection with
cell lines derived from aborted children and using those cells
to test the COVID vaccines, I decided not to take them.
But in short, that this idea that there's no middle
I think the medical community, if they want to keep

(15:40):
doing vaccines, if they want to continue to have the
support of public health officials and state governments, they've got
to start changing their tune on this a little bit
because there's this real overweening arrogance, this overweening confident arrogance
on part of the healthcare establishment, and it's really started

(16:05):
since COVID. When we return, I wanted just to revisit
that the overwhelmingly arrogant confidence of people who didn't really
know what they were doing. Next on the John Grardy Show,
there's been a lot of debate lately about vaccines and
vaccine schedules. Robert F. Kennedy Junior got yelled at by
Democrats in Senate last week about this. And I think

(16:30):
there is a more reasonable middle ground that could probably
be pursued when it comes to vaccines. But The problem
is that a lot of folks in the medical healthcare
establishment have such tremendous arrogance about the whole thing that
they just want to dismiss any kind of questioning of
the status quo as kuchism. And it's important to sort

(16:55):
of remember how insane the mental the healthcare establishment was
during COVID. It was a real eye opening moment for
people to realize that a lot of these people don't
know what the hell they're doing, or they're engaged in guesswork,
but that they put on their work and their opinions

(17:16):
this sort of veneer of infallible certainty. We had public
health officials who were trying to tell people they couldn't
go to a beach, that they couldn't take their kids
to go play at a park. During COVID, we had

(17:38):
public health officials who like, okay, well, the COVID virus,
it doesn't really live on hard surfaces, you know, That's
not really its main vector for transmission. It's vector for
transmission is someone sneezes and gets in your mouth and
your nose, and that's how you get COVID. You don't
get it by surfaces. Well, a public health officials continue

(18:01):
to act as though it was surfaces and continue to
act like everything needs to be wiped down. One thing
that's so silly that I realized is that churches throughout
the country, including my church ol pH, in an effort
to try to demonstrate they were doing something about COVID,
they would wipe down the churches that they would wipe
down the pews every week. And there are all these

(18:25):
churches now with pews all over the country that, like
the wood, the wood finish has been like damaged because
of the chemicals from the cleaning solutions that were used.
So like, are our this has impacted the top that
sort of the top the back of the seat of
the pews at my parish, in clothing at oil pH

(18:45):
Church in Clovis. Yeah, so uh yeah, this is this
is a widespread phenomenon though that was a relic of
the COVID era, but it was because people like and
and it seems as though these public health people just
took the attitude of well, better safe than sorry, when
it's like, well, no, not better safe than sorry. If

(19:05):
you're asking us to do lots and lots and lots
of disruptive things to our lives, then you gotta be
like actually correct on it. Don't be asking us to
take another big inconvenience out of our life without you
like knowing what you're doing. A lot of stuff from

(19:30):
COVID we've found out after the fact was highly questionable,
if not flatly useless. Masking was the big one. Masking
which was a constant pain in the butt, this humongous
inconvenience for everybody. You have to wear a stupid mask.
God knows how many whales are getting choked in the
ocean drowning because they've got COVID masks in their face.

(19:53):
Millions and millions of tons of COVID masks, waste COVID masks,
you know, did help. Nobody freaking knows if they helped.
They barely helped. Probably they didn't do much of anything.
The whole six feet social distancing think that was just
completely made up. Nobody had any idea, and it was

(20:16):
like two meters in Europe, and so people says, ah,
six feet. There was nothing scientific about it. And there's
a lot of indications that like Sweden, which basically didn't
do anything like that, they had just as lousy a
time with COVID as anybody else did that. It really
didn't do much of anything. That Georgia and Florida, who

(20:38):
opened things up much sooner than all the rest of
the states, in spite of the fact that you had
major media outlets saying that, all right, Georgia's gonna just
murder everybody by opening up, and they didn't. They didn't
do any better or worse than anyone else. It's insane,
and and the confidence these people had in their proclamations

(21:01):
when they had no reason to be so confident, especially
when you think about the concept the way in which
regulators get corrupted by the subjects they're supposed to regulate.

(21:21):
So when we return, we're going to examine that idea
regulatory capture. We're going to talk about that next on
the John Girardi Show. All Right, kitties, let's gather around
in all these arguments about COVID and vaccines and public health, well,
vaccines and public health and all the yelling and screaming
at RFK Junior that he needs to resign, et cetera.

(21:45):
One thing that liberals have totally forgotten about or have
just declined to mention since roughly March of twenty twenty
is the concept known as regulatory capture. Regulatory capture, so
I am going to discuss it with you. Regulatory capture

(22:07):
is a kind of basic concept that you learn in
a law school class that has to do with regulatory law.
And basically, the idea of regulatory capture is that when
you work for a regulatory agency, you you personally your job,

(22:32):
your skill set, your resume becomes attractive to the companies
in the industry that you regulate. Let me repeat that,
when you work for a regulatory agency, you develop skills, knowledge,
know how, a resume that is attractive to the companies
in the industry that you regulate. All things being equal,

(23:00):
who does fire? Who does Peiser? Whom? Does Pfiser want
to hire someone with a really great background in you know, uh,
pharmaceutical sciences or someone with a great background in pharmaceutical
sciences who works for the FDA for three years? Well, yeah,

(23:20):
the guy who works for the FDA for three years
is a more attractive person than just someone who has
a good background pharmaceutical sciences. Why, well, Pfeiser needs to
work with the FDA. They need to work under the FDA.
Under the FDA's regulations. If you hire someone to go
to Pfiser to work who has been at the FDA.
They bring with them a body of knowledge, expertise, experience

(23:44):
for how to comply with the FDA, how to work
with the FDA. They were just there intelligence about you know,
how the FDA thinks about these things. Similarly, if you're
the FDA, you want to hire someone who has an
understanding of pharmaceuticals and drugs and stuff like that. Well,

(24:06):
here's a guy who worked at Pfizer for five years.
Oh hey, come work for us at the FDA. So
both sides are hiring back and forth, both the regulatory
agency and the entity that's being regulated. And this happens

(24:33):
at lower levels, this happens at mid levels, and it
happens at the top. Here's a story from twenty twenty two.
Trust issues deepen as yet another FDA commissioner joins the
pharmaceutical industry. Pharma giant Pfizer announced on June twenty eight

(24:55):
that the former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb,
who is headed the FDA under the first Trump administration,
would be joining its board of directors. The move fell
in line with a troubling pattern after their tenure at
the FDA, commissioners tend to go on to advise private
companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Nine out of the last

(25:20):
ten FDA commissioners, said this story from twenty twenty two,
representing nearly four decades of agency leadership, have gone on
to work for pharmaceutical companies. The lone exception, David Kessler,
joined the ranks in academia before eventually settling in his
current position as chair of the Board of Directors at
the Center for Science and the Public Interest, a nonprofit

(25:42):
nutritional science ADVOCACYCRET. SO, nine out of ten FDA commissioners
go on to work for the pharmaceutical industry in high level,
super highly paid jobs. Yeah. So a low level administrator

(26:05):
at the FDA going on to work at Pfeiser. Yeah,
that's maybe a one hundred and fifty one hundred and
seventy five thousand dollars a year job. Getting a former
FDA commissioner to be on your board. Yeah, that's what
four hundred thousand a year, five hundred thousand. I mean,
that's really valuable to Peiser to get a former FDA commissioner.

(26:29):
This person knows how the FDA thinks operates acts. This
person might have sway. You know, maybe another Republican administration
might come in Peiser is going to be able to
have Here's Trump's former FDA chair could reach out to
Trump's current FDA chair to say, hey, you know, just

(26:50):
wish you congratulations. We you know, want to have a
cooperative working relationship regulatory capture. What is incentivized by all this, Well,
what happens out all of this is that the whole
point of regulatory agencies is not to be buddy buddy

(27:10):
friendly with the agency that you regulate. And this isn't
just the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, this is everything
the Department of Energy. Well, someone who works for Chevron
is a pretty attractive person to help regulators at the

(27:31):
Department of Energy. And then oh, someone w works with
the Department of Energy would be a very useful person
to help work for us at Chevron. This incestuous stuff
happens all the time across lots and lots of industries.
And I think you saw like the height of this
in COVID there was total synergy between everything Pfeizer, Astrazenic, Johnson,

(28:00):
and Johnson, et cetera. Total synergy between what they thought
was the best thing to do and what the Centers
for Disease Control, the FDA, all of them wanted to do.
There was no daylight between them you could have. I mean,
people were ready to pledge allegiance to Pfizer just as
much as they were ready to pledge allegiance to doctor

(28:22):
Fauci and to the guy who was the CEO of Pfizer,
just as much as Francis Collins at the National Institutes
of Health. It was like total synchronicity between the pharmaceutical
companies and federal regulators. Is that good? You know, maybe
in a moment of crisis you might argue it's good,

(28:43):
But that's not the job of the FDA is not
to be buddy buddies with pharmaceutical companies. In fact, sometimes
the precise job, I would say, is more often to
be the opposite of a buddy buddy. The FDA is
to regulate the American drug market to make sure that

(29:05):
it is safe, to make sure that the drugs on
the market are legit, to be a check against you know,
the theory being a completely unregulated, laissez faire capitalist market
for healthcare would be catastrophic. That's the idea behind the

(29:29):
FDA is that you can't just let the market solve this.
Why because if someone is selling snake oil drugs, people
might eventually figure it out. But in the meantime, people
are gonna die. If people are selling phony, baloney cancer
treatments at a huge markeup that don't actually do anything

(29:50):
and don't have any sort of government oversight over them
to ensure that they're effective, to ensure that they provide labeling,
that ensure that they provide no listing of ingredients and
studies and all that, then people might die. Patients would die.

(30:10):
The whole point of the FDA is to be a
check on that, to be a check on unscrupulous pharmaceutical
companies whose chief motive is profit shareholder value through profit.
That's what Pfizer wants. So the FDA needs to be

(30:38):
in a bit of a combative attitude. Probably the best
posture for the FDA to be in is to be,
generally speaking, in a combative posture. Well, guess what if
you're the commissioner of the FDA right now and you're
looking out of the landscape, Trump only has, you know,
three three plus years left Trump won't be president after that,

(31:00):
It'll be jd Vance or whoever. You might be out
as FDA commissioner. Well you're thinking about your future? Oh
you can. Hey, Pfizer, you know you hired the last
FDA commissioner to be on your board. Well, what about
me four hundred thousand a year? Hey four fifty what

(31:20):
do you say, like, like, what motive as the FDA
chair do you have? What motive as is the FDA commissioner?
Do you have to go really hard at Pfizer to
be really antagonistic? I mean it might need to be.
The whole structure, the whole theoretical structure of the FDA
is such that you might need to be the biggest

(31:41):
pain in their butt, the biggest thorn in their side.
You might need to be the thing that keeps their
CEO up at night. If Pfizer's trying to get away
with dirty stuff, if Pfizer's trying to push drugs that
aren't as effective just to motivated by profit whatever like

(32:02):
like that. That's the whole concept of a regulatory agency.
They're trying to look out for the public's interest, and
the public's interest might not align with Pfizer's bottom dollar.
But during COVID, for some reason, nobody thought about that. Well,

(32:23):
I mean people did think about it, but nobody in
mainstream media, nobody in the Democrat establishment. Everyone was completely
on board that there was no daylight whatsoever between the CDC,
the FDA and what Peiser and the things that would
make Peiser, AstraZeneca, all these corporations bah blah blah blah

(32:49):
blah ba billions of dollars huge you know, government contract
to buy gazillions of COVID vaccines with no liability, with huge,
hugely limited liability for Pfizer, That this unbelievably advantageous financial
position for Pfiser that made them gazillions of dollars. Then

(33:15):
we just loss it by just the confidence that was
placed in these companies. And again I'm not saying that
every regulatory agency needs to be super aggressively anti every
agency it regulates. And frankly, this is another flip flopping

(33:38):
of political narrative. You know, just like back in the
old days, Uh, most of the anti vaxers were like crunchy,
granola eaten hippie liberals in Marin County. Nowadays it's right wing,
you know, it's right wing nut jobs who don't want
any vaccines like that. That narrative is totally flipped. This

(33:59):
attitude towards regulatory agencies and the industries they regulate. This
is a flip flop. Okay. It used to be forever
that Republicans wanted federal regulatory agencies to be the friends
of industry and not really to regulate them and to
just let them be mean. It was a lot of
sort of Milton Friedman twentieth century laissez fair capitalism, which

(34:23):
for some industries versus others probably made some sense. And
it was liberals who wanted aggressive adversarial regulation of industries,
with the government in this adversarial posture to make sure

(34:46):
that companies that had sort of knowledge of things that
the market couldn't necessarily correct without some people dying, that
there would be better oversight of those companies. The Ralph
Nader kind of folks who were going after the US
auto industry for you know, dangerous things like go you know,
not having good seat belts. You know, the market wasn't

(35:08):
going to correct itself, there was the argument, and by
the time the market did correct itself, a bunch of
people would have died from car accidents without seat belts. So,
in short, this idea that we can't question public health folks, which,

(35:30):
by the way, everyone I heard this joke. I don't
know if it's true. If you are offended by it,
I'm sorry. I'm just reporting what I heard. What does
every Masters of Public Health graduate have that a doctor?
What does every doctor have that every Master's of Public
Health graduate does not? Every doctor has an acceptance letter

(35:52):
to medical school. Masters of public health do not. Now
that is mean, that is probably stereotyping. I'm sure there
are some very smart Masters of Public Health degree holders
out there. However, this idea that their ideas, their judgments,
their group think is infallible and that it isn't in

(36:16):
many ways or couldn't possibly be the result of regulatory
capture by massively powerful corporations that want to make billions
and gazillions and quadrillions of dollars is silly. When we
return the blissful full return of a full football Saturday
and Sunday that is next on the John Girardi Show,

(36:39):
it was a blissful return of football, fantastic weekend for
Fresno State with all kinds of as coach Hill said
the player of that game was the long snapper for
Oregon State, who poor kid probably couldn't do anything right.
A great little forty nine er victory. Too, very dramatic,

(37:00):
and you know, thank God for what's his face the
quarterback of the Seahawks, Darnald Sam Darnold for just dropping
the ball in the final game winning drive so that
Nick Bosa could pick it up. It's just good to
have football back. And I know I'm gonna oh, the
UNFL is woke. Guys, Listen, you have to pick your battles,

(37:22):
and I'm not going to pick the battle over the NFL.
I'm not going to pick the battle over people being
insufficiently mad at Colin Kaepernick. Let's not forget like people
act like the NFL was lame for the Kaepernick thing.
Nobody hired Kaepernick ever again, he hasn't played football once

(37:42):
since he did the whole flag kneeling thing. Actually, I
think the NFL sort of treated handle the Kaepernick thing
fairly well. So are there dumb things? Sure, but guys,
you got to pick your battles. That'll do it. John
Drody Show See next time on Power Talk