Brief: The Free Press Tastes Its Own (Polio) Medicine
We've been highly critical of The Free Press in the past, but a recent memoir-article about grappling with a familial history of polio by Jana Kozlowski stood out. Derek and Julian take no issue with the piece, which was an emotional plea to understand the ravages of polio and the efficacy of vaccines. The comment section is another thing.
Show Notes
Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril.
The First Five Errors in the Moth in the Iron Lung Book
The First Five Errors in Dissolving Illusions by Suzanne Humphries
Amazon Won’t Take a Stand in War Over Anti-Vaxxer Book
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I'm Julian Walker.
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Our brief today is motivated by an article published by The Free Press, which is mostly a memoir.
As an editorial comment on RFK Jr.'s anti-vax history and, importantly, the widely reported fact of one of his legal advisors, Aaron Siri, petitioning the FDA to revoke approval for 14 vaccines, including the polio vaccine.
Specifically, because of the beat we cover, we noticed that the Instagram post about the article had a particularly active and extensive comment section that paints a scary picture Yeah,
the Instagram promo, which had 523 comments, but the article on the site itself had 532. I didn't read all of them, and we're going to read a couple of them today, but it was largely, overwhelmingly anti-vax, do-your-own-resource sort of rhetoric.
And that's why we wanted to take a moment to sort of look at how a website that we've criticized in the past publishes something, which was fine.
It was a memoir, as you said.
It was written by Jana Kozlowski, a good Polish name there.
She's not just a freelance writer.
She's the executive producer of videos and documentaries at the Free Press.
So she very much knows what the website is about.
And people just were not having it.
So to kind of paint the picture here, Jana goes through, or Jana, I'm not sure, goes through some of her family history with polio.
And she talks about Marsha, who is her mother's cousin, who lives in Newark, New Jersey.
Now, I'll also reference Philip Roth's excellent book, one of my favorite novels of his called Nemesis, which is about the ravages of polio in Newark, New Jersey in the 50s.
So this is based on historical events.
Roth writes about Newark throughout his career.
He grew up in the neighborhood and he had a lot of family there.
And so for Jenna Kozlowski, she apparently had family there as well.
This is a very real story.
And just to kind of paint a picture, here's a moment in the article.
While it was too late for my uncles and for thousands of other children, Marsha's three daughters grew up in an America where they didn't have to fear polio.
So did I.
Thanks to the vaccine, there has not been a single indigenously acquired case of polio in the United States since 1979.
Polio is now endemic in only two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where vaccine penetration is difficult.
Now, this is a memoir interesting.
It is not a science piece.
And I keep driving that home because the way the commenters come out at her about the science is pretty telling.
Yeah, and let me say too that Jana Klozowski, I think, did a great job here.
She also ended up being on MSNBC last night to talk about this.
So she is getting the word out about the dangers of anti-vax messaging about polio.
And that's really good.
And sometimes storytelling works better than science.
But to your point, the commenters came in with like, Where's all the science?
Oftentimes it works better.
And that's part of the challenge that we have on this podcast when we're talking about science communications, because so much anti-vax rhetoric is actually rooted in anecdote and storytelling, not in science.
So for the commenters to come back and say, where's the science here?
Yeah.
That is pretty contradictory.
I also just want to flag one thing here because when you're talking about polio, you can't not talk about the Cutter incident because this is a big moment in polio vaccine history.
It does fuel some speculation or rage about vaccines.
But in April 1955, reports of children becoming paralyzed were true.
They came from a batch of vaccines produced by Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California.
Now, the problem is the lab didn't inactivate the virus.
Jonas Salk, who did produce this version of the vaccine, which is not the vaccine that's in wide use today, but he was the one who first got a vaccine on the market, they didn't follow his advice.
And so the people at the Cutter Laboratories used a highly violent strain of poliovirus known as Mahoney.
And 380,000 doses were administered before the problem was identified.
220,000 people were infected with this live polio virus.
Now, of that number, 70,000 developed muscle weakness.
They were after effects.
They weren't terrible, but it was terrible for some people.
164 were severely paralyzed and 10 people died.
Looking back at it, this actually led to much stricter regulations of vaccine development, manufacturing, and shipping.
And given how proactive the government was and Qatar realized what had happened and everyone just jumped on board and knowing what polio had done, it was an instance in American history where the public did regain trust in the government bureaucracy and in vaccines, at least it was an instance in American history where the public did regain trust in the Yeah.
So 70 years ago, when a new vaccine was being developed that ended up being one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of medical science, there was this manufacturing issue, which today's anti-vaxxers will continue to point back to as a reason to fearmonger about today's vaccines.
It's just, it's maddening.
One important thing about RFK Jr.'s stances on vaccines is that when he's asked if he thinks any vaccines are safe, I think Lex Friedman did this at one point in his interview, do you think there are any vaccines that are safe?
He repeats his usual nonsense about how none of them have truly been safety tested because he moves the goalposts all the time.
But then he will say that he thinks maybe some of the old school live vaccines may be safe, but it's the exact opposite.
The science says that live vaccines are the most likely to cause problems, but they're still used today for polio in remote areas with very little infrastructure where oral vaccines that don't require refrigeration turn out to be the best we can do.
One of the hard things I think for people to understand in the spirituality community, like the wellness influencers, is these are predominantly people coming from white, more affluent countries like Australia, like the US obviously, European countries.
And I don't think people understand the challenges of nations like they said, Afghanistan, India we're going to talk about is one.
These are not countries with the same sorts of infrastructures that we have.
So the idea that they have access to what we have access to is just not relevant to the conversation.
So when they use instances that happen in these countries as examples of something nefarious going on, You can't compare these things, and it's one of the more disingenuous arguments that I see.
Yeah.
People need to travel more and get a sense of the reality of what really goes on in countries outside of the developed world.
On a different note, Derek, like literally 10 million other people, I follow this guy named Dr. Mike on YouTube.
I sent you one of his most recent videos because he led with a clickbait thumbnail and a title that read, How the Polio Vaccine Destroyed Trust and In healthcare.
And we both kind of shook our heads with, oh, Dr. Mike, not you too.
But, you know, I found after watching it, he does cover the Cutter incident.
He actually does a really good job in what turns out to be an impressive, like high production animated film with his voiceover.
He does a good job of contextualizing the Cutter incident within the medical and cultural history of the broader topic of polio and vaccines in general and the millions of lives saved.
So, you know, fair play to him.
I think he's actually finding a way to reach people.
Well, that is a question because I do get really pissed by these clickbaity titles that he does.
But I do have some problems with some of his episodes.
He just had Paul Offit on.
He did something similar where he opens up with this kind of gotcha moment.
But then you watch and it's actually pretty good.
And it does make me wonder...
Is this actually effective at drawing people in and then them staying to listen?
Because if you read, for example, on that one about the polio vaccine, with the comments, most people are really happy and are science forward.
So that's actually a good thing.
I want to give them credit for that.
But I will say that I'm not sold on the technique working because of the headline culture that we are.
But that said, the fact that he does unpack it, if he's having some success in that regard, good on him.
And then, in response, you sent me this post on The Free Press' Instagram feed and you said, check out the comments.
Why don't you, Julian, read the most liked comment?
Now, just note, we are only reading comments from Instagram because I am not a paying subscriber to The Free Press.
I can't actually see those comments.
So we're just looking at the Instagram cohort here.
All right.
Most popular comment.
The polio epidemic was actually fueled by pesticides like DDT, which damages the structural integrity of the intestines, which in young children are directly in front of the spinal cord.
This allowed access for toxins and pathogens to cause nerve damage and death, which are side effects of DDT. That's why the peak time for this disease was in the summer, unlike all other viruses, and connected to public pools and farming runoff and water.
They were spraying the pools and the crops with DDT. FDR used to regularly swim in the pond next to his apple orchard before contracting polio.
Also, people do still get polio today.
However, they have renamed all the paralytic conditions with new names like Guillain-Barre syndrome and transverse myelitis.
These symptoms used to be diagnosed as polio, but doctors are no longer allowed to call it that.
Otherwise, people couldn't claim that we eradicated polio.
We did not.
These paralytic conditions are listed side effects on polio and other vaccines and are known effects of toxins and pesticides and chemicals that are harmful to human health.
Yeah, that was one comment and there are so many false things in this.
So the first one, the fecal-oral transmission of polio is well-established and it is made worse by swimming in contaminated water.
Yeah, and you know, this comment, the last time I checked, it had about 130 replies under it that were almost universally, I mean, there's some critical ones, but most of them were saying, well said, someone's finally bringing the facts.
This is the evidence that we need.
This is real open-minded science, right?
All of that kind of shit.
Let me add here, too, that one of the unique Phenomena around polio is that its prevalence actually increased in the developed world during the late 1800s and the early 1900s as sanitation and disinfecting practices became more widespread.
This was because infants were no longer exposed to the virus as often in ways that many were actually able to fight off in their GI tracts, especially if they had some acquired immunity from their mother's polio disease.
And I mention this because it's one of these paradoxical facts about our relationship to nature.
So overall, hygiene improvements were massively beneficial to public health.
But there was this one little complication around polio because if you contracted it later in life, Once everything had shifted around these hygiene practices, it turned out to be more difficult to overcome.
And also, if you think about the time, public swimming pools were really a new phenomenon in the late 19th century, and there's a whole history of racial dynamics around them.
But square around the time of World War II, they were becoming really popular in the suburbs at the time.
So the fact that, like, for the first time in history, all these kids were now congregating in this space was very new to us.
So looking back and saying, oh, well, how do we not know?
It's because this was literally a new infrastructure.
Again, it goes back a little further, but it was having a resurgence around the World War II era.
Back to the commenter, Gillian-Barr syndrome and transverse myelitis are not renamed polio.
They are three different things.
So GBS is typically symmetric and ascending in its motor and sensory impairment, how it affects people.
TM affects both motor and sensory functions at specific spinal levels.
Polio primarily affects motor neurons, and that leads to asymmetric paralysis, which is not what GBS does.
And again, this is just an instance where researchers spend a lot of time figuring these things out.
So when commoners just flatten them because they're all paralytic, it really confuses what we actually know about these conditions.
Yeah, especially when they sound like they really know what they're talking about.
Guillain-Barre syndrome gets brought up all the time by anti-vaxxers around the flu vaccine as well.
But unvaccinated exposure to the flu virus is actually six times more likely to lead to GBS than is the vaccine incidence.
And it's still not definitively proven that the vaccine is causing it rather than correlating with it.
This is similar to the overhyped rare incidence of myocarditis that we hear about and the COVID vaccine, in that the myocarditis that you get unvaccinated from COVID is much more prevalent and So much more severe and likely to lead to hospitalization than the kind that you might get related to the vaccine.
I have one more comment about this commenter, and I will say it's a more controversial one.
And I'm just expressing something that Dr. Paul Offit, who I flagged earlier, said, who is a major vaccinologist, and he's written numerous books about science.
And it's from a 2017 book that I had reviewed.
And to be clear, it's about DDT. And he says that it should be banned for agricultural use, but not for public health purposes when it comes to malaria control.
Now, what happened is Rachel Carson wrote a book that kind of defined 20th century environmentalism, Silent Spring.
It had a lot of really good impacts on waking people up to the problems of big agriculture.
It's still something that people look at as foundational.
Offit is not taking anything away from her, but he is saying specific to this one use of DDT that we should not have stopped using it.
And he brings proof of this in the fact that when they stopped using these small amounts specific to indoor use of malaria control, you ended up having much broader rates of malaria after it was taken away in countries in you ended up having much broader rates of malaria after it was
And in 2006, the WHO actually came back and started allowing indoor spraying of DDT to control mosquitoes in countries that don't have the infrastructure to control it and that have high rates of malaria.
And this position aligned with another organization, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which also allows DDT for malaria control while they ban it for other purposes.
I wrote a review of this book where I kind of fleshed out some of this back in 2017. I had a lot of people really upset.
Because they thought that I was just saying Rachel Carson's book was bullshit.
None of that was in the article, but that's how people treat these things when you hear DDT. Horrible for agriculture, but in one specific instance, and we see this from the rates because a million lives are still claimed annually from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
So...
Just pointing out that when the commenter, again, flattens and misunderstands the role and use of DDT like that, it just makes these sorts of conversations and understandings of chemicals even harder for the public to grasp.
All right, that was a lot on that one comment.
Let's go to the next one.
So this next one for me is really interesting, right?
Because essentially you're seeing perhaps a portrait of what One version of the median reader of the free press might be in terms of what they expect, this idea of fearless engagement with controversial topics and what they think heterodoxy really means.
So the person says, again, my trust in the free press diminishes when you irresponsibly publish articles like this.
Where is the article explaining the detailed history of this disease, the different types of polio vaccines used in different countries, the history of it in the two countries that still have polio, the type of polio found in US wastewater, and a framework of why and how smallpox was eradicated would be a fantastic and a framework of why and how smallpox was eradicated would be a fantastic article as a comparison to what the world is doing now Please do important research instead of fluff pieces meant to scare people.
A fluff piece meant to scare people.
I've never heard that before.
That's great.
She's talking about her family who members had contracted polio.
It's a memoir piece.
Again, this is such nonsense.
This is classic deflection to me and it also represents – I mean we see this all the time and even in comments on our posts.
It's like, why aren't you talking about this?
It's like because that's not what I'm actually addressing.
Just because I'm addressing one thing doesn't mean that I'm completely ignoring things.
And often what happens with us is that people who comment on our Instagram posts, for example, don't realize we have a podcast where we talk about these things for a long time that we unpack from numerous different levels.
Yeah.
And to this point, we talked about this, I think, two weeks ago when we were talking about the role of the press and the fact that an entity like the New York Times, they will publish op-eds that have me yelling at my phone.
But that is the role and function of newspapers to actually give a broad array of voices an opportunity to express opinions Part of that falls on us in terms of understanding the difference between investigative reporting and opinion writing, which are two very different things.
But again, I also understand how these things get flattened in social media so that when you see a New York Times byline, you're automatically like, oh, it must be the opinion of the paper.
That is not the role of a newspaper.
And I have a lot of problems with free press.
Again, we've covered them a few times now.
But that doesn't mean I hate every article on there.
Of course.
And Barry Weiss, to her credit in that sense, is she does give space for opinions that she might not have herself.
And she is at times allowing for that.
I don't think the balance is certainly there as much as I would appreciate from a truly holistic outlet.
But at the same time, you will find conflicting opinions on her site.
And that overall is a good thing.
Yeah.
I mean, even in her interview with Peter Thiel that we tore apart a couple weeks ago, She does actually bring this up.
She does say there's a fringe within the MAGA and MAHA movement that wants to do things like raise doubts about the polio vaccine, and that seems really dangerous.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think on topics like this, she does tend to editorially lean in a position of including some important perspectives.
I think on the political stuff, it's a little more slanted towards right-wing pseudo-populism.
And with regard to this commenter, as with the previous comment, there's just a lot of detail where you can see, wow, this person has really taken in and metabolized and is able to repeat this narrative that suggests that it's irresponsible to talk about the polio vaccine as if it's a crucial bulwark against incredible tragedy amongst children all over the world.
And so they find it irresponsible for the free press to...
Blind privilege.
I posted something by John Kennedy, who is not related to RFK, by the way.
Some people had said, oh, they're both Kennedys.
They're not related at all.
But John Kennedy, who has never once said anything I agree with, he was alive when his friends were getting polio and he just called out the bullshit.
And that's why it's a blind privilege.
If you have not experienced something and you are the privileged...
Of the vaccinations without realizing it, you can just think this is the way it always was.
I can't imagine what it would be like living during that time.
Now, he's the guy who said that RFK Jr.'s legal counsel needs to stop shooting ketamine or something, right?
Yeah, it's stop dipping into your ketamine stash.
Dipping into RFK Jr.'s ketamine stash.
Yeah, amazing.
Amazing.
And somebody commented not to go after ketamine.
It was a joke.
I mean, whatever.
I've done ketamine in the past.
It's a classic.
Who knows what Kennedy knows about ketamine, but I laughed.
All right.
Okay, next comment.
So, can we talk about those who've died or had life-altering complications from vaccine reactions?
Yeah.
I mean, studying these for safety and effectiveness shouldn't be controversial.
And articles like this trying to emotionally manipulate people to just continue down this anti-vax versus pro-vax division is silly.
Why can't it be okay to make sure that we bring informed and using actual science like continuing to learn and develop to better everything for everyone and give people informed consent?
Sorry about the sentence construction there.
That's how it's written.
The only reason people don't want this is because they are being emotionally manipulated by pharmaceutical companies who have money to lose.
The only reason.
Yeah, again, this is the real problem with conspiracism as a way of thinking and the foundational fallacies that it installs.
And they become this operating system within the culture and the worldview that ensues.
This is obviously a smart person, a sentence constructionist side.
I've been known to write a good run-on sentence myself.
They've got good vocabulary.
They've got a well-developed kind of layered opinion to some extent on the topic.
I'm lumping in the previous commenter as well.
The problem is that the starting point is based on a distortion of reality.
This is partially as a result of the Cutter incident and all the rest of the trial and error, actual progress of science and medicine, which they're trying to invoke.
Like, if you're open and you're scientific, we should keep getting better.
And so why are you censoring the open conversation of this?
But the propaganda manufactures the cover-up and then demands scientific standards that are actually already in place. - And yeah, it's classic whataboutism.
And I'll just note that vaccines generally make about 4% of profits for pharmaceutical companies.
There are so many more profit-making drugs.
During its peak, Viagra is making over a billion dollars a year, but you didn't hear any rush to take that away.
But so the vaccine, Vaccines have been a little more of a cash cow since COVID, but now that they're everywhere, that's actually going down again as well.
So the notion that that's the only reason that people like vaccines because pharma inserts that into us is just ludicrous.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I mean, like, we don't have to go into the whole thing, but really, like, in the history of vaccines and its intersection, the vaccine industry and its intersection with the anti-vax movement, the truth is, a lot of companies were up for discontinuing production of vaccines because they got so much, you know, lawsuits that were baseless from the anti-vax industry, and it became, they were making so little profits compared to how much they had to spend on damage control over false claims.
That it's just always been a thorn in their side.
And for the most part, they're doing it for the public good.
And famously, Jonas Salk did not take out a patent on the polio vaccine because he wanted it for the public good.
So he made no money on that besides whatever R&D costs he might have been paid during it.
And so the fact that people are bringing this up about the polio vaccine is even funnier to me.
Yeah, the famous quote when he's asked about it, he said, could you patent the sun?
Nice guy.
And what you just flagged is a real problem with antibiotic development because since the 80s, pharmaceutical companies used to produce a number of antibiotics every year, and now they're producing a few every couple years because there's just not money.
And part of the problem with that is that there isn't government spending Specific to antibiotics.
So antibiotic resistance is a real thing.
Viruses will evolve or bacteria will evolve and mutate and we need constant antibiotics to be able to fend against that and we're not getting it.
So there are problems with overusage of antibiotics, things like people taking them when they shouldn't be or their use in agriculture is also...
There's some There's some controversy around that topic, which you can argue that it's overused there as well because of the resistance that it creates downstream when we eat those animals.
And so we're not keeping up with the science.
So we're going to see different strains coming back that are very fightable that we're no longer able to fend off.
Well, I've got some all-natural cleansing products for you that'll help with that.
So just hit me up.
Hit me up.
I've got to get these parasites out of my colon.
Exactly.
All right.
So next comment here.
Highly recommend Moth in the Iron Lung alongside Dr. Suzanne Humphrey's book, Dissolving Illusions.
If you don't understand the polio situation, oh, there should have been a comma there, dissolving illusions, if you don't understand the polio situation, which the author of this article clearly does not.
So a few people brought up these two books.
I won't go too into them, but they are super...
Popular on the anti-vax circuits, Moth in the Iron Lung promotes the debunked theory that pesticides, back to DDT, were the primary cause of polio epidemics rather than the polio virus, which is the actual cause of the polio virus.
Polio peaked in 1952. DDT use peaked in 1959, but the author tries to correlate them as if they were peaking at the same time.
The book ignores substantial evidence supporting the role of poliovirus.
I love this.
It claims that those iconic photos of iron lungs were staged to scare people.
Oh my gosh.
There's a lot of correlation, not causation, that's brought up, which is very common in anti-vax rhetoric.
And the author has no medical or scientific credentials.
His degrees are in religion and music, which, you know, I have a degree in religion and I was a music journalist.
Fine.
Yeah, not against that, but if you're writing a book about debunking the safety and efficacy of vaccines and you don't have the prerequisite skills and you don't consult people who know those things, which is what a journalist would do, then that's going to be pretty shaky.
I also don't want to too quickly go away from the thing that you mentioned there.
Polio peaked in 52. DDT use peaks in 59. In the intervening time, you have polio reducing, reducing, reducing because of vaccines and DDT increasing, increasing, increasing.
The thing about all of this stuff, it's like AIDS denialism, right?
There's a moment within the developing knowledge of a topic where all of these questions actually are examined.
And then the scientific consensus moves forward.
And what conspiracists always do is they go back to pre the period when these questions had been examined and the evidence had been carefully considered by people who know what they're talking about.
And they say, no, no, no.
You know what else it's like?
It's like the terrain theory, right?
Same sort of thing.
You go back to the time before we made a radical advance in our understanding and knowledge about the world and claim that some completely discredited hypothesis is still viable, but it's being covered up.
Yeah.
So finally, the book has spread.
Moth in the Outer Lung has become popular recently because a bunch of anti-vaxxers on TikTok have picked it up and talked about it.
So that's probably why it's a brain worm in some of these commenters.
And then dissolving illusions, a lot of those same criticisms apply.
Humphreys uses graphs and statistics to To suggest vaccines were not responsible for the decline, completely flawed analysis.
And she also, like RFK Jr. often does, she claims that sanitation was the real reason for the eradication of polio.
But it's the opposite.
I mean, this is the amazing thing, right?
This is one of your points where you could say in the old days when we lived in contact with the earth before the intervention of like You know, modern technology, we had greater resistance to polio because we actually did.
Sanitation did not improve polio rates.
It made polio worse.
It's just this paradox that you actually need to be really open-minded to understand these things.
Okay.
We have two more comments.
Julian, would you do the honors?
Yes, absolutely.
Oh, and remember when they made more stringent diagnostic criteria for diagnosing polio around the same time they released the VAX? A little sus and would definitely drop the number of cases anyway, considering how many conditions used to fall under the polio umbrella.
Again, a little research goes a long way.
So I did a little research on this.
I concluded it is the classic conspiracist mindset.
Before 1954, criteria for diagnosing polio were very broad.
So any physician could report a case of paralytic poliomyelitis and laboratory confirmation was not required.
He could say, that looks like polio.
Okay.
And it would actually go into the literature as being a case of polio, even though there were no diagnostic criteria.
In 1955, Salk's vaccine was approved and the diagnostic criteria were changed to conform more closely to the 1954 field trials.
And so these new criteria required residual paralysis to be determined 10 to 20 days after the onset of illness and a second examination 50 to 70 days after onset was required.
And so these procedures were refined to distinguish from other conditions like Coxsackie virus infections and aseptic meningitis from poliomyelitis and...
And so previously, those other conditions had been mislabeled as paralytic polio.
They actually did the work of saying, okay, let's actually tease these apart so that we can better diagnose them and treat them.
It's a little sus, the fact that science progressed in these ways.
And this is actually like VAERS, right?
Anti-vaxxers will always point to VAERS, which is this completely unvetted site where anyone can upload any anecdote that they have where they think the vaccine has caused some terrible side effect and there's no...
Evidence required.
And so you have these inflated numbers, and then when people go in and sort through it and say, okay, well, let's actually try to get a handle on this data, that sounds a little sus.
A little sus.
Okay, one more.
Last comment.
Maybe do some research into how oral polio virus currently causes global outbreaks of polio.
Granted, this isn't the vax sending the states, but this isn't something to miss in this conversation.
I don't know what that last sentence means.
Okay.
Yeah, well, that one, yeah, I don't know either.
But the commenter is discussing non-polio acute flaccid paralysis.
And he's not actually wrong.
So I want to unpack this a little bit because this is, again, an example of someone where somebody reads about something or knows about something, but then confuses the science.
And we're going to go back to causation and correlation here because as of now, there's a correlation with the oral polio vaccine, but it has not been termed to be causative.
AFP, which is non-polio acute flaccid paralysis, the rate rose in India from 1,005 cases in 96 to 60,992 cases in 2012.
So there is definitely an increase.
That is true.
And there was an oral polio virus vaccine that was introduced during that time.
But part of the reason is that improved surveillance systems may have led to increased detection of those cases that were undiagnosed, That's one role, and we see this often again when diagnostic criteria and surveillance has changed.
The definition of polio in India has been modified over time, which also affects class classification.
India itself has been polio-free since 2011. So some researchers are actually proposing reducing those oral poliovirus vaccine rounds to potentially decrease.
So there is work being done to address this.
And then sometimes it's confused with another side effect of a vaccine, which is real, called VAP. But VAP occurs in one case per 1.4 million doses.
But here's where I'm going to guess that the commenter came in on this because over the past couple of years, this claim has been very popular on Twitter that Bill Gates has paralyzed over 300,000 kids testing vaccines in India.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is the tough thing, right?
And it goes back to what we said early on, that in areas that don't have good infrastructure, in areas where there are these initiatives, these philanthropic initiatives to get in there and try to reduce polio rates and save lives and stop families from having kids who are paralyzed, you do end up using the oral vaccine.
The oral vaccine sometimes has this side effect.
There's also another thing that can happen in areas where there is inadequate sanitation.
Where kids may pass the live, if the vaccine is live, they may pass it in their feces.
And then other kids who have not been vaccinated may come in contact with that feces.
And so there is some of this very, it's a small amount, but it does happen.
And then you have the complication of, in addition to that, there's this non-polio, what did you call it?
Non-polio acute flaccid Paralysis.
And we don't actually fully understand how that works yet.
Yes.
And also just to the infrastructure question, I've used this step before, but I think it's important here.
In the US, an average of one person dies every year from rabies because the rabies vaccine is available everywhere.
In India, an average of 18,000 to 20,000 people die from rabies, 99% of them from dog bites.
And Looking at the broader scope, there have been years where there have been closer to 50,000 deaths from rabies.
This is an extremely preventable disease that because the infrastructure does not exist in India, that people are just...
Can you imagine if 20,000 people a year were dying in the US of rabies?
Again, this is a real problem.
And when we look at it and we're using nations like this to express this conspiracism around Bill Gates, the fact that he puts billions of dollars into vaccination development in these countries, and we're saying he's killing people, it's just such utter nonsense.
Yeah.
And it's, again, like you said earlier, earlier, it's evidence of privilege and the problem that medical science in general and vaccines specifically are kind of a victim of their own success in that you have generations of people who live in a reality because they don't go and visit these other countries where none of these like rabies is not really something you have to worry about.
But guess what?
In times gone by, we did have to worry about it.
And in countries that don't have access to the level of privilege we have, it's a real thing.
My final comment here, and this may sound oversimplified and condescending and, dare I say, even smug, but all anti-vaxxers suffer from two problems.
The first is they don't understand how the scientific method works.
And the second is they lose track of accurate proportions when dealing with enormous population statistics.
This leads to things like confusing correlation and causation, believing lies about safety and efficacy testing, and then overreacting to these floating numbers of very rare side effects that are not properly contextualized, while literally millions of lives are being saved from illnesses that used to be devastating.
