Recently, “holistic veterinarian” Marcie Fallek, whose latest book, “Little Miracles Everywhere: My Unorthodox Path to Holistic Veterinary Medicine," is the #1 bestseller on Amazon in the Alternative Holistic Medicine category, appeared on Children's Health Defense's daily morning show.
During “Pet Vaccines and Holistic Vet Care" she spreads the same sort of vaccine misinformation and fear-mongering that RFK Jr's nonprofit has become infamous for. All of which made Derek realize that yes, they're actually coming for our pets.
Show Notes
Why Your Vet Bill Is So High
Private Equity Is Killing Your Pets
Nearly 70% of veterinarians have lost a colleague or peer to suicide, study finds
The acute suicide crisis among veterinarians: 'You're always going to be failing somebody'
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If I gave you a brand new little puppy today, would you give that puppy any vaccines?
You personally?
Probably no.
Oh, fuck.
Here we go.
Hey, it's Derek Barris, and this Conspirituality Brief is called, No Really, They're Coming for Your Pets, because, yeah, they are.
You just heard Marcy Fallick.
She's a holistic veterinarian and author of Little Miracles Everywhere, My Unorthodox Path to Holistic Veterinary Medicine.
which is currently the number one bestseller on Amazon in the alternative holistic medicine category.
The interview is Polly Tommy, and she's the host of Good Morning Children's Health Defense.
Yeah, that's RFK Jr.'s nonprofit, and yeah, they have a daily morning show, and that's just one of their shows.
CHD.TV has a ton of programming, and some recent morning shows include titles like Pfizer's Crimes Against Humanity and Stop 5G. But the show that made me stop the scroll when I received their daily newsletter is called Pet Vaccines and Holistic Vet Care.
And for years, I've seen these awful videos.
You've probably seen them too, all over social media.
You see a chiropractor cracking a dog's spine or neck and telling them how that's helping their health.
And in reality, humans have long anthropomorphized animals.
Like many people, I grew up loving cartoon bears and Ricky Raccoon and cats and dogs, but our fascination with animals goes back far longer than that.
These half-animal, half-human hybrids predate many human representations in classical art.
Greek mythology gave us centaurs and satyrs and fawns and harpies.
And in Indian mythology, we had human-like monkeys and gods with six arms like spiders.
So we love animals, and that's cultural, as I get to in a moment.
But what we're doing is we're taking our fear and neuroses around Human pharmaceuticals in the medical industry and increasingly we're applying them to our pets.
And that's really fucking sad and dangerous as far as I'm concerned.
So I'm going to get into Falec and her interview in a few moments.
I want to say two things off the top.
So our fascination with animals might be old, but the definition of pet changes from culture to culture.
Many countries don't really exclusively make cats live inside of their homes, for example.
If you've seen videos of Turkey, a country I really hope to visit, they have famous cat culture in the streets where they come into restaurants, but they don't really necessarily live inside of houses there.
And the American pet industry is pretty wild.
It's currently valued at $147 billion.
And a lot of people from other nations think that's pretty insane.
I'm floored by that amount of money personally, but my wife and I also love our two cats and we're going to soon be welcoming a dog into our home.
I don't pay for excessive accoutrements for them, but I do pay for healthcare plans and some good toys and scratching posts and food and snacks.
So I get it.
You love these animals and you want to take care of them.
My former cat, Osiris, almost made it to 22 years old before he passed, and we currently have two healthy cats.
One's a 14-year-old Maine coon named Magellan, and we have a 9-year-old insane Persian called Baltazar, and we take care of them.
Which sort of leads me to my second point and caveat here.
Healthcare for animals is nearly as out of control as for humans in America.
And this is partly because private equity companies have been buying up veterinary clinics.
And it's also partly because pet insurance doesn't cover a lot of things and these services are really expensive.
Like anything, when you live in a country with pretty unfettered capitalism, it ravages everything it touches and pets are no different.
Add to this the fact that veterinarians suffer from high occupational suicide rates.
It's a really tough field.
They're around pain and suffering all the time and then you have this added layer of stress because, to be frank, some pet owners are assholes and they're really super demanding.
I guess it goes for the same in our human healthcare system as well.
But this has created a shortage in vets and that's added to the excessively high costs.
And add on top of that, all this grew way worse during COVID when a lot of people decided to get pandemic pets that they then dumped off at shelters when they realized they couldn't take care of them.
And that added even more layers of stress and anxiety to vets and shelter workers.
I bring up the costs and the stresses of veterinary care because, as with many things anti-vaxxers do, they point to an industry that's not always in the best interest of patients.
I do put a lot of that load on this private equity push because groups have been buying up veterinary hospitals.
I'll share some links in the show notes about that.
I'll put that on them more than vets because I don't think you really go into this field of work if you don't love animals.
all this up because what you're going to notice in this interview with Marcy Fallick in the clips that I've chosen is that she often conflates human healthcare with veterinary healthcare, and this works against the benefit of animals and pet owners.
As with many wellness influencers we cover, Fallick's story is similar and She worked in allopathic medicine until she had an awakening.
And not only would she not vaccinate a puppy as that clip I chose off the top, she repeatedly repeats vaccine misinformation.
Yet if you go to her website, she offers a host of services that you're probably familiar with if you listen to this podcast.
Homeopathy, Reiki, untested and unregulated supplements, which are even actually crazier to think about because at least we have communication with other humans.
So say the placebo works with a supplement, you can actually talk to someone about that.
You're just guessing with animals, which makes it even kind of more egregious.
Now, I will say that humans have gotten much better at understanding how animals communicate in the last, really, generation, especially in the last decade.
So it is totally possible to talk, in a sense, to your animals.
But knowing whether or not a supplement works is a different level of that.
And then you have Phallic.
She writes this on her website, quote, It is my professional opinion and the professional opinion of thousands of holistic veterinarians around the world that we are over-vaccinating our companion animals.
Most veterinarians are administrating yearly vaccines whose duration can be even more than 10 times that.
I believe that every vaccination has the potential to do irreparable harm.
And that with each and every vaccination administered, there should be an advantage risk assessment.
There is risk assessment done.
That is what testing agencies have to do.
That's the whole purpose of regulations.
And if you're wondering if Phallic links to clinical research about, say, irreparable harm or 10 times that number, no, of course she doesn't.
She does link to other alt-med pseudoscience sites on vaccination, however.
And in fact, let's hear her.
Let's go back to the interview.
She's talking about her experience in veterinary school.
Well, to be honest with you, in vet school, I learned nothing about vaccines.
There it is.
If you've been following the podcast, you know that I've recently been criticizing Stanford Medical School graduate Casey Means, who wrote a book on metabolic health despite not being trained in endocrinology.
She's been on the Make America Healthy Again train with RFK Jr. and featured on Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan's podcast recently.
And what she does is she has a rhetorical style where she lists all the things she wasn't taught in medical school.
And then says that, oh, but I was taught how to cut open and build people, because she's trying to create a narrative.
Now, I found Stanford's curriculum for med school students, and she was absolutely trained in the things that she's denying.
And I don't know, maybe Fallick has been tracking her game plan, because veterinarians are trained in immunology and vaccinology.
They're taught about certain types of vaccines, including rabies, parvo, and Lyme disease.
They're taught how and when to administer them.
And when I was looking on her website, I saw that she received her doctorate of veterinary medicine from the University of Bologna in Italy.
So I went to their site and checked out what they teach in that program.
Surprise!
Pharmacology is one of the seven core subjects that she was taught.
She was also taught clinical medicine modules for small, large, and exotic animals.
So that's three separate modules.
You're allowed to change your mind and you're allowed to change fields.
People evolve over time.
If someone wants to go into more natural-based solutions for healthcare as compared to modern medicine or evidence-based medicine, That's their decision and you can have your reasons for it and that's completely fine.
I might not agree with it, but we're all allowed to change throughout life.
But don't just make shit up like this.
These are checkable things.
We can find out these curriculums.
I mean, maybe her memory isn't serving her so well, but I know I'm suspicious when I hear shit like that.
And then next, she says this.
When I first started practicing, we were told, we just accepted this is what you do.
And I vaguely remember at that time, before I really learned about the dangers, Untrue!
It's actually difficult to assess because she uses the vague they, making it seem like it's all vaccine manufacturers.
Again, there are regulations.
And vaccines are tightly regulated.
Information about their ingredients is available through data sheets and regulatory authorities.
Now, she mentions proprietary.
There are formulations that are proprietary and they may limit the exact ratios, but veterinarians have access to active ingredients and potential side effects.
That's by law.
It's actually also part of the job of vets to explain all of the interventions that pets receive.
I've been offered or given pamphlets at every vet I've gone to and I've lived in four states in my life.
And then you have organizations like the American Animal Hospital Association who publishes detailed vaccination guidelines that veterinarians use to inform their practices and educate pet owners.
There's that saying that's been going around a lot is that anything can seem like a conspiracy theory that if you don't know about it or if you're ignorant of it.
And I'm guessing that has to be the audience that she's speaking to here.
Because if you just do basic searches, you will find out all of this information.
It's accessible to us.
And sure, maybe not every vet offers pamphlets all the time or does the greatest job of explanation.
There's a range of doctors out there across every field.
But to extrapolate from limited experience and pretend like that's an industry standard is just bullshit.
Also, let me slip into anecdote mode here briefly because my wife works in UX research in the pharmaceutical industry.
Her job specifically is to advocate for patients with disabilities when they're designing pamphlets and websites and apps.
So are the colors, if someone's colorblind, are they going to be able to see this?
Because believe it or not, if you go to a lot of websites, colorblind people can't actually read any information.
And you can imagine if you're working in the pharmaceutical industry, you have to make sure that they're able to read everything on that site to know the risk assessment that they're getting into with whatever they're taking.
So in that role, she works with designers and also copywriters.
Every single word that goes into a pamphlet released by the pharmaceutical industry has been vetted by lawyers.
It has to be.
Because if you mess up one word, you are legally liable for that.
I've seen the process many times now.
It is so rigorous and demanding.
Again, I'm not giving a pass.
I have so many problems with the pharmaceutical industry overall in our for-profit healthcare system, but to pretend like there aren't regulations or information out there, that is provably untrue.
Now, let's get back to this interview because remember earlier I had mentioned the conflation between humans and animals?
With my research, what I learned is that yes, we probably have all the crap that's in the regular, but Human vaccinations, but I don't have that research information in front of me.
Ah, so she did her research, but she doesn't have it accessible.
Apparently, she has no problem just inventing statistics, however.
So if someone's watching now and they have a dog and the dog has been vaccinated and they know that that dog is injured, is there something that can be done to help these dogs?
Is there a detox method?
Is there something that people can do to make their dogs better from vaccinating?
Well, that's what I deal with all the time.
I'd say about 70% of what I see is vaccine injury.
So as a homeopath, I'm absolutely able to help.
I'll give you an example.
This is a terrible example.
It's crazy, though.
I saw a woman.
I'd seen her with a past pet.
And she actually has an autistic child from a vaccine.
But the cat had vaccines by the breed before she got it.
In four and a half years of doing this podcast, I can tell you that one of the biggest red flags are the words, as a homeopath.
A study of more than 1.2 million dogs at 360 veterinary hospitals found a reaction rate of about 1 in 260 dogs to vaccines But this includes any type of reaction regardless of severity.
This means fatigue, reduced appetite, low-grade fever, the same type of reactions that are common in humans.
These are not injuries.
Actual long-term effects are extremely rare.
So, for example, Feline injection site sarcomas for all cat vaccines, they occur at about a rate of 0.148 per 10,000 doses.
That's 0.148.
And about 0.064 for the rabies vaccine specifically.
I mention this one because earlier this year I saw that Jackson Galaxy, whose videos and books that I've loved, he has his homeopathic herbal line, which is just absolute garbage.
But they market it by talking about this site sarcomas, so the idea that getting a shot is automatically going to give your cat cancer.
And these are the rates.
They are extremely small.
Now, going back to the interview, why did she mention that the cat lives with a child who has autism?
What does that have to do with the cat?
It's just thrown in there because that's where the conflation happens.
If you're associating these bad vaccines that humans get with these bad vaccines that animals get, well, it makes it a lot easier to sell your services in your book, apparently.
Now they wonder if titers, which is a diagnostic test that measures the concentration of a substance that exists in a solution.
And in this case, they're discussing the amount of antibodies that are in the blood of an animal and whether or not titers can replace a vaccine.
many vets these days will accept titers.
Basically, unfortunately, I think profits drive the medical industry in the veterinary field as well as the medical field.
And the vets, you know, there's been so much pushback from many dog and cat owners about vaccines.
They've been kind of forced to accept the titers, but the labs are also benefiting from this.
They They make a fortune.
So when the vets, from my perspective, see that they make a lot of money doing the titers, they're more than happy to do that instead of the vaccine.
So yes, most of them can do titers for distemper and parvo for dogs.
The rabies titer is a little more tricky.
She's right about profits.
That's why I started with it.
I have the same issues, but she's wrong about everything else there.
What are we even doing here?
Titers don't replace vaccines.
They're meant to tell you if you should revaccinate your pets, or if you've recently adopted a dog, they can tell you if you need to catch up on vaccines.
I've seen some writing where they say if you're scheduled for a revaccination, you can use a titer in consultation with your vet to see if you want to delay it for a while.
The dog's health and other risk factors need to be considered at that point.
It probably isn't the best course of action, but it is something you could do.
But remember, Fallick said that she wouldn't give a puppy any vaccines, and that's really scary.
Also, certain geographic areas require that your pet be vaccinated against rabies.
This isn't a hard one to understand.
In America, an average of one person a year dies of rabies.
The reason is because we have widespread vaccines that are pretty readily accessible.
That average death usually happens when someone's out in the wilderness and can't get to a hospital in time.
Meanwhile, contrast that with India.
There's between 15,000 and up to 50,000 deaths a year from rabies in humans every year because they don't have an accessible rabies vaccine.
These are not hard statistics to compare and contrast.
And then she's talking about something like parvo.
As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I are getting a Rhodesian Ridgeback.
And when the woman whose dames came over and we talked and sat with her, she told us she's been breeding Ridgebacks for 42 years in the Portland area here.
And she has a real love for them and knows this dog very well.
But in general, between talking with her and then talking to the owner of a dog school that's nearby, they said you don't start any sort of classes or integration with other dogs until they can get their Parvo vaccine.
And that means usually about a month after we would get the dog.
I actually have a neighbor whose puppy died of Parvo because they just happened to pick it up because they were outside probably too early.
It's horrific.
It's terrible and preventable.
And you need the education to know whether or not they can be integrated with other dogs, which I'm learning about right now, but they also need that vaccine.
So for someone to say a homeopathic remedy, which actually isn't even a thing, I won't hold you that much longer, but they do discuss flea and tick medication, and you can probably guess where this goes.
I would absolutely stay as far away from them as possible.
It's not an option.
I live in Connecticut, and my dog swims every day.
So there are some things that we'll talk about that we could put on them topically that are safe.
But because my dog swims every day, it just makes no sense.
I happen to pick off the ticks.
I use natural products in my yard and in my house to repel fleas.
I use nematodes.
They're microscopic worms that you can buy that all they do is eat flea larva.
And if you live in a house, you can put it in the yard and you do it like every 10 years.
And I really have had no fleas since then.
You could use borax products in the house that physically...
Dehydrate fleas.
And I really haven't had a flea problem in my house for about 15 years.
You can use diatomaceous earth, which is fossilized algae, to rub into the dog or cat's coat once a week.
That will 100% repel fleas and ticks.
Ah, yes, a medical professional using anecdotes instead of data, probably because the data doesn't align with what she's saying.
As with vaccines, flea and tick medications are rigorously tested for safety, and the vast majority of pets tolerate them well.
Recommending that people pick off ticks is just absurd.
First off, she lives in the state where Lyme disease originated, and that doesn't mean that the virus isn't transmitted by the time you're able to get to the tick.
Then we get to nematoids in your yard, That does actually break the flea life cycle, but it's not foolproof, especially if your dogs leave your yard, which she clearly states that they do.
Same goes for borax with the added caveat that there are health risks if humans or pets inhale it.
I also find it pretty funny that someone who's going so hard against chemicals in the forms of vaccines and pharmaceuticals is just going to leave sodium borate all around as if that's not a chemical as well.
And finally, diatomaceous earth does not 100% repel fleas and ticks.
It's also not recommended to ever rub on animals because if a pet inhales it, they can suffer from lung damage.
It also has a drying effect on the skin, which can.
What is she even talking about here?
Come to think of it though, maybe all of this was just a little bit off.
Maybe in reality, I just misread the title of her book, Little Miracles Everywhere.
