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Aug. 26, 2023 - Conspirituality
22:56
Brief: Softening The Turtle Shell (w/Frank Han, M.D.)

The anti-vaxxers have a new Bible: an anonymously published (and RFK Jr.-connected) 500+ page tome, Turtles All the Way Down. Julian talks with pediatrician and pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Frank Han of ScienceBasedMedicine.org, who is in the midst of a 10-part “grand debunk” of this 2022 compendium of pseudoscience scare-mongering. Show Notes Frank Han’s Grand Debunk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
In today's brief, I'll be talking to Frank Hahn, who's a board-certified pediatrician and pediatric cardiologist who writes for science-based medicine.
And we'll be talking about the anti-vaccine book titled Turtles All the Way Down.
Welcome, Frank.
Thank you for having me on.
Absolutely.
Thanks for making the time.
So, the anti-vaccine industry boasts a boatload of books and quote-unquote documentary films like Andrew Wakefield's Vaxxed and the one by RFK Jr.' 's Children's Health Defense titled Medical Racism, The New Apartheid.
But this book, Turtles All the Way Down, which was published almost exactly a year ago now, seems to be making new inroads.
I just started to become aware of it because I noticed on Twitter and some threads people would say, you have to read Turtles All the Way Down if you want to know the truth.
And then I looked and it's currently listed on Amazon as the 1300th, in that range, bestseller in all books.
But more troubling than that is it's the fourth bestseller in their children's health category.
And the fifth in public health administration.
Now, Frank, you've taken on quite the Sisyphean task here.
You're going through this entire 518-page text, and you're doing a 10-part series of articles that you call a grand debunk of it.
So first, who wrote the book?
Who published it?
What's the general topic?
The specific authors I don't think are known.
It's an anonymous author team.
It was edited by a Children's Health Defense Council by the name of Mary Holland and a liaison with Children's Health Defense and also Thinking Moms Revolution co-founder Zoe O'Toole.
The general idea is they tried to look at each of the administrative, FDA, basic science, and medical science aspects of pediatric and some adult vaccination, and they try to find all of the logical holes in what
Uh, mainstream pediatricians do, but they don't do a very good job at it.
Aha.
So why, I mean, there's so much of this kind of stuff out there.
Why did you decide this was worth your time, first of all, to read and then to do this long series debunking it?
The, well, I certainly could have, there's a very large number of choices of anti-vax books to debunk.
And so I thought this book used most of the Main tactics that the whole anti-vaxxist ecosystem likes to use and I mainly picked it so that you could I could take the opportunity to illustrate all of those tactics and where the
I don't think so.
ecosystem has their own logical holes.
Yeah, yeah.
So that makes sense that it would be a kind of bumper, but given that it's so long, it's
a compendium of all of the standard fallacies and misleading anti-vax talking points.
So it provides a good opportunity.
Is there anything new so far?
I don't think so.
If you look back to even way back when the first anti-vaxxer posters were done back when
the smallpox vaccination was a brand new thing and they were trying to inoculate cows with
and milkmaids with the very, very first vaccination.
Even back then they were using some of the same tactics but in general I don't think there's anything particularly new, maybe with the exception of they
periodically look at some of the newer studies and apply some of their same logical
problems to them and then come to the wrong conclusion.
Yeah, I mean, if we think back to that time with smallpox and cowpox, the sort of hysteria
that was being propagandistically sort of dispersed by people who were opposed to vaccines
at that time seemed to have a religious and a kind of science phobic, like monstrous sense
that you know, you're going to be.
You're gonna be giving your kids cow DNA, essentially.
You're creating some kind of monstrous human-animal hybrid, and of course that would be against the will of God.
Are you saying there are some arguments that are similar to that, or what are you referring to?
That's the general idea, yes.
So some of the arguments that are used in the book, they don't go over smallpox very much, of course, in this book, but some of the general ways that they think are still the same.
And if you even just look on just science-based medicine, some of the to some of the posts back in the earlier days and you'll see similarities and the topics.
Yeah it's interesting too that the book is flying under anonymous authorship right which is it's sort of it both gives someone a sort of kind of immunity against being accountable for what they've written but it feels like it also perpetuates a kind of conspiracist intrigue right where it's like They're keeping their identity secret because they're a brave truth teller or something.
Is that the sense you get?
Exactly right.
So at the moment, the big story, and we're covering it a lot here, although it seems like his campaign might implode soon, is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is still running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
One thing that I hear him say a lot When the topic turns to vaccines, is that no childhood vaccine has ever undergone pre-licensing placebo-controlled safety trials.
Does this book repeat that claim?
And what's the problem with that claim?
It does repeat that claim.
But what you have to do is to look at the very first trial in a particular vaccine category to find the placebo controlled trial.
So the WHO has a long document on how to ethically use placebos.
And so the general idea is that you have to Make a placebo as close as possible to the medicine you want to test with the exception of the active ingredient.
And so in some cases that can be saline and in some cases that can be a vaccine container with all of the inactive ingredients but not the pneumococcus or meningitis or whatever vaccine that you are designing.
And so if you go, the rule in the WHO discussion on the topic says that when there is no vaccine available for a disease, you may test it against placebo.
But the newer iterations of the vaccine, like for example, there are several iterations of the pneumococcal vaccine.
Those are tested against the older, the newer ones are tested against the older iterations
of the pneumococcal vaccine.
And so, if you only look at those, you'll get the impression that there was no placebo
But if you go back to when that particular vaccine was first tested, then you'll find the placebo control file.
Yeah, it's interesting, right?
Because on the one hand, I hear this is a kind of gishgallop tactic that a lot of anti-vaccine activists will do and conspiracy theorists in general, is they'll find some technicality.
Where, you know, sometimes to be fair, sometimes they probably think they've really discovered the way in which people are being duped.
And so I heard you describing different types of placebo that might be used, right?
And how It seems that a lot of times they're going to say, well, this trial doesn't qualify as having used a placebo because they weren't even given an injection, for example.
Or maybe the injection they were given didn't also include, say, the adjuvants that are often claimed to be dangerous to children.
Can you say anything about that?
I think that Dr. Paul Offit has written some really in-depth So the general idea is yes they will say okay there's a vaccine that was tested against another vaccine and they're upset about that and they might say that a vaccine was tested against the inactive ingredients or they would say that the vaccine was tested against the older version of the
The older version of the current vaccine, such as the PCV13 versus the older PCV7, and then they'll get all disappointed about that kind of thing, but then the general idea is that they're concerned that not enough side effects are captured, but then when each vaccine is released, there's a long period of Yeah.
Yeah.
So they're, what you're saying is they're, they're just wrong.
They just don't understand how the process works essentially.
like in England, you'll have the yellow card scheme, but they have, there's lots and lots of time
for a national health department to monitor for side effects.
Yeah, yeah, so what you're saying is they're just wrong.
They just don't understand how the process works, essentially.
Or they look at that end, or they just look at a portion
of the whole vaccine safety monitoring process, and then they complain it's not up to their standards,
where when they could have put everything in context.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It strikes me too.
You know, one thing I've noticed a lot, and Bobby Kennedy will do this, is that people who are, they'll say they're not anti-vaccine, they're just asking questions, right?
They just think vaccines should be tested in safer ways, and we should have an open conversation about them.
They claim that there's censorship happening.
One of the, Things that they will invoke is the specter of the horrible medical atrocity that happened at Tuskegee.
And I'll talk about how, you know, what's happening with vaccines today is similar to what happened in Tuskegee.
And the thing that always strikes me as incredibly ironic about that is that what was done at Tuskegee is the whole population of people was given No medical treatment.
So, they were told that they were being given medicine, but they're actually being given placebos and being told that they were being treated for syphilis when really what the researchers were doing was tracking the disease process of syphilis to see what would happen if it was untreated, which is an absolutely terrible thing to do.
And yet, these anti-vax people will bring up This is an example of why you can't trust big pharma and why you can't trust medical science.
But when I hear someone like Bobby Kennedy saying, listen, if I'm president, I'm going to make sure that we have, we're going to look at all of these childhood vaccines and we're going to test them really, really carefully.
And we're going to do double blind placebo.
control trials to make sure that they're absolutely safe.
To me, I actually hear him suggesting a version of Tuskegee because I'm imagining a whole group of children and infants who are in a double-blinded group so that nobody knows whether or not they're being given the vaccine but they're being given a placebo Against illnesses that we know produce death and disfigurement and disability in reliably awful ways.
Does that add up to you?
So I would answer that at several levels and that yes, the general idea is they don't really consider that aspect of the trial that they propose.
So I would, I guess many of us would like to see RFK tried to argue their case in front of an institutional review board
and then see what the response is.
One of the big reasons that we don't run that kind of trial is because then we expose
children and adults to very serious vaccine-preventable diseases.
And so for the Tuskegee thing, I think that most mainstream physicians would be
upset at what the people, the organizers of that trial did.
They could even join the anti-vaxxers in saying that that was very terrible stuff.
So that's why there are lots of rules on the ethical conduct of randomized controlled trials and the ethical completion of informed consent these days.
The public is welcome to look at with their physician if they're interested and so I'm all for answering questions in my office and that's really a big part of what physicians do.
And so what I see as an issue on social media is there are certain groups of people who ask questions without a sincere desire to know the answer or they go there to ask questions to pick a fight. And so those kinds of things are generally
not welcomed by mainstream pediatricians or other science communicators. But if you want to have a
discussion of a journal article or one of the clinical trials on a pediatric vaccine, I
would be more than happy to stay late to help that family do that kind of stuff.
And I think many of my pediatrician colleagues would as well, but it's just potentially may require more than one visit if you're in a primary care Yeah, that's much more worthwhile than trying to engage with people just asking questions on the internet who typically have an agenda and a pretty extreme sort of set of beliefs that they're dug in on and they're basically asking you questions to try to lead into whatever their next fallacious argument is going to be, right?
So I know that with regard to Turtles All The Way Down, you've just delivered the first two installments of the series.
Are there main points so far that you think it's worth summarizing right now in terms of what it gets wrong?
And are there things that are half right or that it's getting right, but is maybe sort of misusing?
I think I would summarize my two essays with maybe two to three points so far.
So one is they try to look at a small area of what we do in vaccine science and then distort it.
A second point would probably be just a lack of Outright lack of reading when they say something was not done when it was actually done.
And then the third thing is for certain things that they propose, like you said, RCT with a new vaccine versus saline placebo, they fail to really, really think through the consequences of what they want.
And I think those three points would summarize the two essays I put out so far.
I have right now, Dr. Hannes, a tragic sense that as a culture, we're in a worse place now on this topic than we were before COVID.
With anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant attitudes about the COVID vaccines now having a spillover into all vaccines, especially those required for children.
Is this something that you're seeing, you know, both in your work and in your writing and research?
Yes, I think so.
I think that the primary care physicians and physician assistants and nurse practitioners are seeing the brunt of it because they have to deal the closest with all of the childhood vaccines.
I'm a subspecialist, so I don't spend most of my time talking about those things, but looking at what our colleagues in primary care deal with, I'd certainly have to see it.
And the vaccine that comes up in The our subspecialist office, the most is the COVID vaccine.
So we're certainly seeing a lot of discussion to that effect on that.
But yes, as a whole primary care ecosystem, yes, we're seeing a lot more And it seems that, especially with childhood vaccines, we probably should be prepared for a few years now in which there are going to be things like measles outbreaks, there are going to be various kinds of tragic outcomes amongst children from diseases that, in a way, we've been a victim of the success of vaccines that people have just not seen how bad these diseases can be.
And now we're going to get to have another chance at seeing The reality of large numbers of kids being unvaccinated, or a higher percentage than we've had before.
Does that seem right to you?
Right on.
So, talking about how the vaccines are sometimes a victim of their own success, that's certainly true in that even a lot of pediatricians, younger pediatricians these days, have not seen vaccine-presentable diseases directly.
Our mentors and older generation have definitely have and it's really a shame that a lot of communities will
have to learn the hard way, so to speak, on what a genuine measles or pertussis
outbreak looks like.
So as a science communicator, I wanted to finish up by just asking you what you think
the best approaches are to trying to improve the discourse around vaccines, both publicly
and also in our personal lives, because a lot of our listeners may have friends or colleagues
families who are tragically confused on the topic.
There's several levels of things that need to be done.
So I think that More collaboration between the physician and healthcare societies and the legislators on vaccines is ultimately going to be the biggest long-term connection that needs to be made because you can see many, many anti-vax characters over the past few years have been just touring the country or other countries speaking their mind to legislators with all of the same
Topics that are illustrated in totals all the way down and the legislators are fundamentally, usually lawyers by training, so they don't have the science background to really accurately debunk what those witnesses are saying.
And so they need to hear from physician and medical societies about the importance of childhood vaccination.
On a personal friend and physician visit level, I think if you have a friend that is willing to talk about it, that is fantastic.
I would set up something along the lines of a judgment-free zone, like, hey, come on down, we're friends, we can talk about this and discuss the science of the issue at hand.
And so with the If you're in a physician visit scenario, I think that having the opportunity to talk about a specific aspect of a vaccine chemistry or clinical science, I think is a great thing to do.
And then it may help a family get it because a lot of It's understandable that most people aren't chemistry majors and they don't know how vaccines work really really in depth so it's understandable that there's some fear as to how these things work and so just having at least starting with a systematic conversation in your physician offices
Office time, I think, is a great way to start at the individual level.
What about the person at the water cooler at work who says, you know, I've been reading this mind-blowing book called Turtles All the Way Down, and it's making me rethink my choice to get my kids vaccinated.
Maybe this time around I won't do it.
What can a sort of, you know, everyday layperson say in response to that?
Is there anything?
If they've really, really, really, really changed their mind, then probably that's very, very, very, very hard to start to make inroads, because in some cases it becomes almost like a tribalism.
This is wrapped into their identity, and those are the most difficult cases to talk to.
But it may start with an open-ended, let's say non-judgmental question, such as, how do you know?
Or present points.
Ask them to present points from the book and then start to have this discussion with them.
It may take a while, but it may require people who are good friends or people who have known each other for a while.
I would never try this on the New York subway for example, but if you can start with a Judgment-free zone and some kind of open discussion.
That's the best way to start between two acquaintances in the office.
So there has to be a level of trust there is what you're saying in order to maintain the human connection whilst wading into these difficult Dr. Francon, thank you so much for joining me today and I'll remind people they can find you at sciencebasedmedicine.org where you're doing this 10-part debunk of turtles all the way down.
I appreciate your time.
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