Bret Weinstein speaks with Dr. Toby Rogers on the subject of the economics of autism.Find Toby Rogers on X at https://x.com/uTobian and on Substack at https://tobyrogers.substack.com.*****This episode is sponsored by:Jolie: For your best skin & hair guaranteed head to http://jolieskinco.com/DARKHORSE to try it out for yourself with FREE shipping. *****Join DarkHorse on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to ma...
Every single shot on the CDC's childhood schedule, according to the best vaccine data set in the world, causes more harms than benefits.
But there's a reason for that.
The reason why...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast inside Rail.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this morning with...
Toby Rogers, who is a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia in political economy.
And we are together at the Brownstone Institute conference.
You are a fellow of the Brownstone Institute, as am I. We've just had an excellent conference.
And in any case, I thought we would have a conversation about some of the shocking things.
That you presented.
So, Toby Rogers, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you.
I'm a huge fan of your work.
It's such an honor to be with you.
Great.
Well, I am excited and I will say slightly trepidatious about having this conversation.
I have come to know you over the course of several Brownstone events.
I have great respect for you, for your work, your dedication to the truth.
I also know that your topic is...
Among the many third rails that exist, one of the most troubling.
But I think, as my viewers will come to discover about you, feel compelled to confront this whatever the fallout might be.
So, political economy is not that controversial.
Left of center orientation.
But it was the intersection of your work between political economy and health considerations, specifically patterns of autism, that I think led us to be inhabiting the same space.
So do you want to say what it is that you have found in the course of your work?
Describe it just sort of generally and we'll go from there.
Yeah, thank you.
Well, so I didn't choose this topic.
This topic chose me.
I went to the University of Sydney intending to study a different topic, and this was 2014. One year into my PhD program, my then-girlfriend's son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
And so I innocently decided to spend one day.
One Saturday, reading everything I could about autism just to wrap my head around what was happening.
And in a PhD program, you read original source documents.
You're not allowed to use secondary sources.
That's frowned upon.
So I went to the CDC website, and they have a narrative about what's going on with autism, prevalence and causes and that sort of thing.
But...
The CDC is a secondary source, right?
And so when they're talking about the possible causes of autism, they have footnotes.
And so I would look and look up their footnotes, and I'm at this world-class university that has access to every database in the world.
And so I look up the studies and start reading the studies.
And very quickly I discover that...
The CDC's narrative about what's happening with autism does not check out.
We have this sharp rise in prevalence over the course of 50 years, quite literally a 27,600% increase in autism over the course of 50 years.
And the CDC's narrative about possible causes of autism does not...
Engage with the reality of that sharply rising prevalence at all.
And so I fairly quickly realized that the story wasn't adding up.
So I researched the question for a second day and a third day, and then it had turned into six weeks.
And now, nine years later, I'm still...
Working on autism.
So I ended up changing my doctoral thesis topic to the political economy of autism.
I spent the next four years in my PhD program reading everything that's been written on prevalence, costs, and causes of autism.
Okay, fascinating.
Especially, I did not know that you had set out to...
Educate yourself for a day and this has taken over your life.
I think many of us have had that experience on a number of different topics and it is a symptom of something.
When you are living in a civilization where something has captured the narrative engine and created cover stories for many different crimes of many different scales, the way you discover That you're not living in the world you thought you were living in.
The way you discover the matrix is innocently.
You just, something doesn't add up and you decide to settle it so you can just resolve it in your own mind or something along those lines.
And then lo and behold, the more you dig, the worse it gets.
So you said autism has seen a rise of, did you say 27,000%?
Correct.
27,000%.
So if I am...
Doing the math correctly, that means 270 times the rate of autism.
That's the rate of increase over what period?
50 years.
So, first autism prevalence study comes out in 1970. It's by this author named Treffert.
And it's the first attempt to calculate the autism rate in society.
But the reason the first study doesn't happen until 1970 is that autism prevalence was so low.
It was statistically almost zero.
So it was this obscure, fringe, nobody studied autism, because there just weren't very many cases of it.
So the first autism prevalence study, 1970, has a rate of 1 in 10,000 children.
And quite literally, there's a story about a chief of a hospital in that era, in the 1970s, who...
Had an autism case in the hospital of a child who'd come in with autism.
It was so rare that he gathered all the other residents to come in and meet this child because he thought that that might be the only autistic child they would ever meet in their lifetime.
By today, the rate is 1 in 33 children.
So it's a 277-fold increase over this time period.
And when you look at the prevalence numbers, the studies over time, in the early 80s, the numbers tick up a little bit.
One in 5,000, one in 2,500.
But it's really in the late 1980s that the numbers skyrocket, where we see it go to one in 150, and then under one in 100, and then in the 90s, the numbers go through the roof, and they've increased ever since.
The scale and the skyrocketing of the prevalence numbers in the late 1980s really needs to be explained.
And that's the sort of thing that the CDC cannot explain, FDA cannot explain, mainstream academics usually cannot explain.
And so there's a story there that I felt needed to be uncovered.
Now, if you asked...
Somebody from the CDC, somebody expert in this topic, if there was a large increase in the prevalence of autism, what would they say?
So the CDC and FDA and NIH and the mainstream medical community have various thought-terminating cliches.
Yep.
The thought-terminating cliches are in contradiction with each other, but they...
Just allow those contradictions to sit there and they don't do anything about it.
So the CDC will say, on the one hand, autism is genetic or it's largely genetic or something like that.
The problem is there's no such thing as a genetic epidemic.
The human genome does not change that fast.
So if there's sharply rising prevalence, it suggests that there's something else going on.
It's not genetic.
So then the CDC pivots.
And the CDC says, well, what must be happening is that we just have better awareness.
We're just so much more benevolent and kind and aware than ever before, so that surely the number was always 1 in 33, but we just somehow overlooked it in the 1970s and before.
Now, that's a tall tale, that suddenly we're more aware than ever.
The truth of the matter is, let me pause for a second to say, then they'll throw in another sort of face-saving argument that says, well, the definitions have changed over time.
And so maybe it's changes in diagnostic criteria, where perhaps we're calling things autism today that in an earlier era we might have called something else.
So they have these various saves.
They don't check out.
So the state of California...
Funded two large, multi-million dollar studies to look at autism and to see if better awareness or changes in diagnostic criteria were responsible for the increase in autism.
And they hired the best researchers in the state to look at this question and it doesn't really check out.
It's a small part of the increase, maybe 10-20%.
It cannot explain the 27,000%.
It doesn't make sense that we suddenly might have become 27,000 times more aware of a problem than before.
And so the researchers hired by the state of California to look at the surging autism prevalence concluded there's something else going on here.
Look at environmental factors.
That's where they left it.
Okay.
Now I want to unpack a certain number of things there.
The idea that autism is genetic or has a genetic component and that that has something to do with the increase, I regard as a major tell.
As a biologist, I hear this explanation thrown at certain kinds of disorders that society does not want.
To understand.
And each and every time, my feeling is, you have just lied in a way that I can detect because I've trained to understand the language that you're speaking and what you've said doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
But the public isn't going to get it because genetics is a black box.
And so it just simply works as an excuse that won't work on a thinking professional, but it will work on your average person.
And the reason for this is so, in fact, one thing I would suggest to you is that when you say, you know, there's no such thing as a genetic epidemic, true, and the human genome doesn't change that fast.
I think you're actually underselling the strength of this point.
And the way to think of it is, even if we make ridiculous assumptions in favor of the imaginary transfer of a gene that produces autism.
If we imagine something very simple, like there is a gene, it's dominant, so if you've got it, you've got autism.
That gene is not going extinct, even though it creates a massive disadvantage.
Let's say that you give it the benefit of something called meiotic drive, so that every offspring you had, instead of 50% of the offspring you produce, 100% of the offspring get.
This gene that causes autism, even if we make those kinds of assumptions, some individual gets this gene through mutation, and then the question is, well, how far could that gene get in 50 years?
Well, even if we are generous, let's say it's 100 years.
In 100 years, you would expect, even if every offspring, instead of 50% of the offspring, even if every offspring had it, and those offspring...
You would expect something like five doublings in a hundred years.
You'd be up to, you know, maybe with very generous assumptions, 32 people would have this thing, right?
You're not talking about millions of people from some origin point.
So, and then the other thing, which I don't know if you're aware of, but this genetic explanation is used to dismiss the epidemic of malocclusion.
That is the failure of children's teeth to meet properly, which really isn't about teeth at all.
It's about the misshapen jaws.
And so the entire field of orthodontia is effectively participating in a fiction which says that, you know, jaws are getting misshapen as a result of genetic defects spreading across the population in an epidemic-like fashion.
If there's one thing you can be certain of, it's that that story can't be true.
It's not true.
The same sorts of explanations are used for the increasing prevalence of mental illness.
And the point is, it just doesn't work that way.
It's not a chemical imbalance based in a mutation.
If it was, it would be spreading very, very slowly.
In fact, we wouldn't even notice it.
We'd have a few curious cases of something.
It probably wouldn't even have a name yet because no doctor would ever see two of them.
So that is a tell.
When they say, oh, genetic, what they're really saying is, don't look over here.
You didn't take enough genetics, and you're about to be embarrassed by what you don't know.
So it's a cloak for something else.
And that means that people like you and me are entitled to say, okay, I get that there are certain things you don't think cause autism, but it's not reasonable that we are not obsessed with figuring out what it might be, because if it's not...
A genetic defect spreading through natural processes.
It's an exposure, which means whatever it is that kids are being exposed to, we could stop it.
Is that fair?
That's fair.
And I would add to that and say the federal government has spent over two billion dollars, billion with a B, two billion dollars searching for the gene for autism.
Private foundations have spent another $300 million searching for the gene for autism.
They have nothing to show for their efforts.
They've done all these candidate gene studies, and no gene that they've identified can explain anywhere more than 1% of cases.
There's no there there.
And what I see happening...
Is that the federal government spends an inordinate amount of money on genetics research.
It's become a sort of sinecure make-work program for the scientific community.
So the federal government, NIH, floods the market with funding for genetic research.
Go find the gene for this.
Find a genetic treatment for this disease.
In order to prevent the scientific community...
From studying toxicants, from studying toxic chemicals in the environment that are making people sick, or things that we consume, or food, or pharmaceuticals, or all the rest.
So the NIH is intentionally spending, so NIH spends $8 billion per year on genetics research, but it is intended to divert attention from the true causes of disease and illness in society.
It's an outrage.
It's a crime that's happening.
Which, in our society, has a kind of a suspicious smell to it, because the idea that it would be an exposure to something, something novel, something that is apparently highly prevalent, suggests there might be a business involved in the production of that something, and therefore we have to ask the question, is the reason that our public health establishment cannot find...
The cause of this thing that has gone up 27,000% in 50 years is the reason that they can't find it because somebody has a profound interest in them not finding it and has figured out how to capture the regulatory apparatus.
A hypothesis that at least ought to be on the table.
Anytime you've got a massive increase in some kind of harm, it appears to be an exposure and we can't figure out to what it is.
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Go to I would also point out that there is a story where, you know, the inability to find that gene that is responsible for this.
A. Yeah, all right.
Looking at genomes isn't all that easy, but we've gotten really good at it.
Finding the gene is not the same thing as understanding in what way it's caused.
It's just a question of saying, hey, that sequence seems to predict these people have this disorder, right?
And we're getting really good at sequencing genomes.
So if we can't find the gene, that's because that's the wrong explanation.
This reminds me of the remarkable lack of progress that O.J. Simpson made in finding his wife's killer over the course of his lifetime after he was exonerated, right?
He never found the killer.
And that's because he was looking in the wrong place, right?
Looking in the mirror would have been a good idea.
He was looking everywhere but the mirror.
And so I suspect that's what's going on.
I think your hypothesis is correct.
And I have tested your hypothesis by following the money.
So chapter 5 of my doctoral thesis, The Political Economy of Autism, follows the money.
And it was, like many things in this research, it was sort of innocent at the beginning.
I started to hear about this crisis in science, and it started with the fact that most scientific studies could not be reproduced.
And there was concern about that in scientific journals, that a lot of the foundational studies, not just in psychology and psychiatry and some of the fields that we thought might not have reproducible studies, those were failing.
But it was also cancer research and lots of the foundational studies in medicine were not reproducible.
And so I started studying that and there was...
Discussion on that in the scientific literature and why might that be?
And so it led to a conversation about capture of medical journals and the way that medical journals, we think they're just, you know, publishing the truth, peer review and all that.
Well, no, that actually doesn't check out.
Medical journals are captured by industry, the pharmaceutical industry and others.
So medical journals are kind of problematic.
And then, well, it turns out medical schools themselves are captured.
The top two-thirds of medical school faculty have some sort of contracts or grants from the pharmaceutical industry.
And we see university endowments that are entangled with investments in intellectual property, new startups for pharmaceutical products, and the rest.
So there's capture of medical schools.
And then I discovered that CDC, NIH, FDA all have these private side foundations.
Right.
Where private corporations can make contributions to this side foundation to fund the research inside these agencies, NIH, FDA, CDC. And I thought, no, wait a second.
That's a clear financial conflict of interest.
The side foundations for CDC, NIH, and FDA enable them to enable a pharmaceutical company to place staff So if Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Pfizer, Moderna, or the rest contribute to these side foundations for these federal agencies, they can put an employee inside these agencies who's now an official FDA, CDC, NIH employee, but who has dual loyalties to the agency where he or she works and to their real employer, the pharmaceutical company.
So this chapter turned into 100 pages.
And when you follow the money, what you discover is that the entire knowledge production process in science and medicine is captured by industry.
Usually the pharmaceutical industry, but other toxic industries as well.
Pesticides and plastics and fire retardants and all the rest.
It's what we thought was this sort of pure scientific discipline.
Is nothing of the sort.
It is this captured data-laundering operation to increase profits for large industries.
Yeah, this is simultaneously shocking and not at all surprising, right?
Because, of course, market forces are extremely powerful.
Evolutionary forces are extremely powerful.
There are tremendous profits to be made.
The obstacle to those profits is supposed to be that scientifically we discover that the thing that you want to do that makes a profit is actually so destructive that we can't let you do it.
And the institutions that are supposed to make those adjudications are unfortunately staffed by people who are corruptible.
The question is really, you've got a massive niche for a parasite.
If only that parasite can accomplish a couple of things, right?
It effectively has to get past the immune system, the immune system being the scientific apparatus and the regulators that are supposed to prevent us from doing things that are destructive to people.
But that's not an impossible job.
Right?
In fact, especially if there's a huge profit to be made by doing it, then the point is that profit is made of money.
It's fungible and it can be used to incentivize those structures to look everywhere but the one place they should be looking, for example.
So it shouldn't be surprising to us that they do that.
It shouldn't be surprising to us that medical schools effectively become training grounds for avoiding the truth.
And you can imagine, I mean, I've seen this happen in science, where the graduate student comes in, they have no power, they are in terrible jeopardy of being thrown out on their ear.
And so what they do is they learn which noises result in you continuing to advance through this program so that the investment you've already made isn't wasted.
And by the time they get done with the program, they've actually...
You know, taken on these things as if they're, you know, well-established scientific truths and they're nothing of the kind.
So, you know, science is a beautiful process.
It's self-correcting.
But it only works if you actually do it according to the underlying philosophy that makes it work.
Most scientists aren't even aware of the philosophy of science that makes it work.
They think it's sort of built of beakers and lab coats and data matrices and models or something.
That's not the scientific method.
The scientific method is an actual commitment to falsifying beliefs with a well-constructed experiment and this other process is so much more powerful that it overwhelms it easily.
Yeah, the philosophy of science has been lost.
And I think mainstream society thinks of science as this separate walled garden that is somehow free from the constraints and the conflicts and the problems of capitalism.
And it's nothing of the sort.
Scientists are human like the rest of us.
They have mortgages.
They have bills to pay.
They're competitive and they want to be powerful and power corrupts and there's greed and all the rest.
They're just as fallible as the rest of us, but they have this unique epistemic position in society that gives them extra power.
We think that they have special training, special insights, and so we should defer to their wisdom.
And in this case, that is a mistake because the people were counting on to protect us from Toxic chemicals end up being bought off by the industries that are harming us.
And that's at the root of the autism crisis and lots of other health crises in America.
So I would also just say it's not totally wrong that scientists are above this.
It's mostly wrong.
But let's just say lots of us went into science because we were.
Committed to finding the truth irrespective of where that truth might be.
But there's a bias in terms of your ability to make a career doing that, especially if there's an entrenched financial interest pulling in the other direction.
So what many, you know, the problem is you may see scientists and it may appear to be some kind of consensus.
But the point is, well, who did you throw out because they disagreed?
If you start throwing people out because they followed some other chain of evidence that came to a different conclusion, then you create the entirely false impression that, you know what?
You want to know if vaccines cause autism?
Ask the scientists.
Well, who didn't become a scientist because when they followed some other path, they ruined their career?
So, did you meet any resistance in your work?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
My department, bless their hearts.
I love them dearly, but they were smart enough to know that this was a radioactive topic.
I don't know how I wasn't smart enough to know that.
I knew it was controversial.
I didn't know it was radioactive.
And my supervisory committee was...
In some respects, it became an ideal process because it was adversarial.
They were...
Protecting, maintaining, defending the mainstream position on all these questions, and I had to fight for my views and fight for what I was seeing in the data.
It was iron sharpening iron, and I think it produced a better product in the end as far as the research that I did.
But every step along the way was contested, and it was not easy, and so, you know, learned a ton in the process, but it was...
It was a fierce debate for four years long throughout the whole process.
And again, it made for a better work product in the end.
But, I mean, that's what science should be, right?
It should be adversarial.
It should be contested.
It should be ideas clashing with each other to see which ideas survive in the end.
Adversarial is great.
That's built into the philosophy of science.
Adversarial in good faith.
Right.
Obstructionist is a different matter.
And it sounds like you've got decent adversarial honing.
Yeah, I got the best of that.
Great.
So, obviously, humans, especially human cognition, is beyond complex.
Right?
It's not only within the realm of the complex, but in the extreme end of that.
So this story isn't going to be, you know, Perfectly simple.
But what did you find in terms of toxic exposures and other causal elements that have an important role to play in the increase in autism?
Yeah, so I read every study that has been published, or nearly every study that has been published, on possible environmental causes of autism.
In my research, I grouped them into five categories, five classes.
So we have coal-fired power plants and cars.
That's mainly a story of mercury, but some other toxicants.
But coal-fired power plants and cars.
Plastics.
So ingredients in plastics, BPA and fire retardants.
There's concerns about those.
Those are endocrine-disrupting chemicals, usually.
Then pesticides and herbicides and fungicides.
Those are problematic.
Then EMF and RFR, so electric and magnetic frequencies and radiofrequency radiation.
And then pharmaceuticals.
Specifically, I looked at SSRIs, Tylenol, and vaccines.
And so I do a chapter on each of these different classes of toxicants.
But essentially, the first four classes of toxicants, so coal-fired power plants, plastics, pesticides, and EMF, Electromagnetic frequencies.
That causes some cases of autism.
So it increases your risk somewhere between 30% and 200%, depending on your exposure.
And so, for example, with pesticides, there are very good studies that if you live next to a field sprayed with this pesticide during this trimester of pregnancy, your rate goes up 45% of autism.
So, at first, that appears like the answer.
30%, 40%, 50% increase in autism, 200% increase in autism.
Well, that's great.
That must be the answer.
And it's not.
Because remember, we're trying to explain a 27,000% increase in autism.
So that's just this mountain of increased prevalence.
So 100%, 200% increase risk of autism from a particular chemical, it's just a small step.
Up that mountain.
It's a contributor.
It's a contributor.
It's not the lion's share.
Correct.
So in my research, I show that the pharmaceutical products are the most harmful.
And there's a reason for that, right?
So pharmaceutical products, particularly vaccines, bypass the body's usual defense mechanisms.
The skin, the alimentary canal, kidneys, liver, other things the body used to protect itself from the environment.
We know that SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antidepressants, increase autism risk if the mom takes SSRIs during pregnancy or, interestingly, in the 30 days before pregnancy.
It's actually the toxicants stay in the body and the bloodstream and increase autism risk.
We know that Tylenol taken during pregnancy and...
In infancy, increases autism risk.
And we think that has something to do with the fact that Tylenol decreases the body's ability to remove toxicants.
But unfortunately for me and you and everybody who's working to address the chronic disease epidemic in America, all roads...
Lead back to vaccines.
Unfortunately, all roads lead back to vaccines in this debate.
And so I did a deep dive.
I did a whole chapter on the harms from vaccines.
But unfortunately, it appears like the lion's share of autism cases are being driven by the sharp increase in the number of shots that children get.
And the schedule has increased in size.
And it has moved earlier into the lifespan, and now we have vaccines given during pregnancy, and that appears to be what's driving the autism epidemic.
Okay, so Heather and I, when we wrote our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which we completed in 2020, wrote into it that vaccines were one of the three great medical technologies that had advanced.
The ball profoundly.
The three technologies being surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines.
There's still a part of me that believes that vaccines are potentially extremely valuable.
But in the process of discovering what unfolded under COVID, I of course had the same or similar experience as you have had, where you end up looking at the COVID vaccines, which are based on a very different...
Brand new technology, or at least the deployment of the technology is brand new.
And then you start comparing it to other vaccine technologies.
And I was flabbergasted at what I came to understand about how modern vaccines work that are not mRNA-based, that are standard, the kinds of things that are given to children.
I was also flabbergasted to discover...
How many more vaccine doses are given to children as a result of CDC recommendations.
So there's a story here that has to do with the change in the...
When we say vaccine, we mean one of a number of different things.
The original vaccines were what we would now call live attenuated.
Where you take an actual pathogen and you breed it into a state where it causes very little disease.
You give it to somebody.
They acquire that very minor disease, but their immune system learns the formula, the molecular formula of the surface of the pathogen so that it recognizes it instantaneously and shuts it down if you ever run into the highly virulent form in the wild.
That technology is, in principle, very powerful.
The idea, and in fact, whether the mythology of our Western vaccines is accurate or not, I don't know if the story is apocryphal, because I haven't dug heavily there yet.
But the story is that Edward Jenner noticed the pattern that milkmaids were immune to smallpox.
Smallpox, an extremely virulent, deadly disease.
And the reason that milkmaids Were immune to smallpox was that they had contracted a closely related, effectively attenuated smallpox called cowpox.
They'd encountered it in the milking of cows.
Having a case of smallpox, having a case of cowpox was a tremendously good deal if it protected you from smallpox.
So, logically, it makes sense.
How do we give people some cowpox or its equivalent so they don't get smallpox?
Great idea.
I still believe that's very elegant, assuming that that story holds up.
But the problem is, you can imagine, I'm explaining this not to you, I'm explaining it to the audience, but you can imagine that the industry that produces vaccines is not going to love the idea of producing a living, weakened...
Because, of course, once you inject people with a living, weakened pathogen, you are not in control of what happens to it.
Does it recombine with something else?
Does evolution restore its virulence?
Does it react differently with different people's systems?
And in some people, it creates very profound disease.
Does it spread from one person to another?
There's all kinds of reasons to be concerned about a live pathogen as a vaccine.
So they've invented other technologies, right?
The next in line would be...
A vaccine that is based in dead fragments or dead entire pathogens.
The problem with that is that the immune system doesn't take it seriously, right?
The immune system looks at that and it just looks like garbage.
So it does standard garbage collection rather than mounting an immune response that would create memory cells that would create immunity.
So what did they do?
They added adjuvants.
They added mercury.
Yeah.
So I, at the beginning of COVID, if I had heard the word adjuvant, it had not really taken hold in my mind.
I had not understood that the immunity that we induce with what we call vaccines now is largely predicated.
On freaking our immune systems out with a toxicant that causes the body to feel that it must be sick, and therefore it goes around looking for an invader, and it finds the dead fragments of pathogens that have been injected, and when things work well, it mounts an immune response to them that then would protect you from the live pathogen if you encountered it.
But if you had sat me down in 2015 and said, You don't know this, but the vaccines that you're having administered to your children are largely based in giving your children an immune hyperactivating set of atoms.
I would have said to you, how could that possibly be safe?
And where's the list of things that I should avoid exposing my child to while they have these adjuvants in their systems so that they don't become allergic to their food, the mold in their building, the, you know...
Allergens in the air.
Allergens in the air.
Right.
It doesn't make sense as a technology, and it certainly doesn't make sense as a technology where they inject you and send you home and don't tell you to alter your behavior.
So, and then once you do alert me that there's a thing called an adjuvant in these vaccines, I want to know more about what it is, and I want to know...
You know, when you said at the beginning of our discussion that a vaccine bypasses all of the normal protective systems, you know, we're...
We're so elegantly designed, right?
Our skin is capable of fending things off.
Our guts are built to fend things off.
I used to think that an inoculation was an ultra-elegant intervention.
You know, the tiniest needle, right?
Just introduces this little piece of information into your system, and then your system...
You know, takes over from there, learns the formula for the pathogen, and there you go.
You've picked up immunity at the cost of a little pinprick.
I now understand.
No, no.
If you're taking a needle and you're bypassing all the normal protective systems, you are engaged in a radical intervention.
Now, it may be that you're being injected with saline and the radical intervention has no meaningful consequence.
But what are the adjuvants made of?
Well, mercury and aluminum are the two favorite ones.
There's others, but heavy metals.
Okay.
And what...
The body is not built to take metals that have bypassed the skin and processed them elegantly.
So what happens to the adjuvants and how do we know?
So...
In my PhD research, I read the safety studies that were used to get mercury and aluminum approved as safe adjuvants to include in vaccines.
And mercury largely got grandfathered in, which is a scandal unto itself.
The aluminum safety studies are both comical and horrifying.
So, aluminum adjuvants are in more than half of the vaccines given to children today.
So, just backstory.
Parents in the 1990s were seeing autism in their children, were seeing skyrocketing autism rates.
They discovered that mercury was in vaccines.
They protested against that.
So, FDA and CDC removed...
Mercury from lots of vaccines.
Not from all of them.
It's still in the 10-dose flu vial and some of the others.
But as they're taking mercury out, they're adding more aluminum back in.
And I actually believe they did that to keep the autism rates rising so that they wouldn't be blamed for rising autism cases.
This is in the early 2000s.
So I did a really deep dive into the aluminum safety studies.
The aluminum safety study...
Used to allow aluminum into vaccines in the U.S. was based on a study of four New Zealand white rabbits.
Now, anybody who's taking statistics knows that you cannot get statistical significance unless you have a sample size of at least 30, but you actually want a much larger sample size than that.
But in this case, the study was based on four rabbits.
And there's problems.
In doing safety studies in animals because they may or may not be applicable to humans.
But that's the study the FDA and CDC rely on.
And then in this study, they promptly lost the results from one of the rabbits.
So we're down to just three rabbits.
And then the results in the rabbits were horrifying.
In the three?
The data still exists.
Exactly.
So the rabbits are killed after 28 days.
So we have, and there were no behavioral tests.
They didn't have them run mazes.
You can't talk to a rabbit.
So there's no measure of the impact.
You're wrong about that.
You can talk to a rabbit.
They won't talk back then.
So there's no tests of cognition.
There's no tests on what it did to the mind of these rabbits.
But when they sacrifice these rabbits, The aluminum adjuvants were still there.
They were looking at two types of aluminum adjuvants.
And in one, 94% of the aluminum adjuvant was still in the body.
In the other, in the mid-70% range of the aluminum adjuvants were still in the body.
So the theory was that, well, the body excretes the aluminum through the urine.
Well, nope.
That's not what happens.
It's still in the body.
And the places that you find the aluminum adjuvants in the body are what you would expect, but they're horrifying.
It's in the kidneys and the liver.
It's in the heart.
It's in the lymph nodes.
It's in the bone marrow.
And it's in the brain.
So the study was terrible to begin with.
And even with that, the results were horrifying.
And even with that, then the FDA and CDC declared...
This must be safe and effective.
It's beyond Kafkaesque in its absurdity because the science is so terribly bad that anybody who reads that study would not want to inject their children with aluminum adjuvanted vaccines.
And that's just one ingredient amongst hundreds in these vaccines.
Yeah, it's a fascinating...
Because in some sense, if they told you, oh, well, we're going to use aluminum to freak your immune system out so it reacts strongly enough to the weak vaccine that we're going to give you, and you said, well, how do we know that that's safe?
And they said, well, we don't.
That'd be vastly better than, well, actually, how do we know it's safe?
Well, we did a safety study and it failed miserably.
And the study was designed not to reveal harm, and it did anyway.
And it's like, well, that's way worse than no evidence at all.
That's like profound evidence of harm in a study designed not to be able to find it.
Something is off, right?
That just, you don't fail that exquisitely without trying.
Right.
I mean, quite literally, when I was doing my research, I mean, look, I was a true believer.
I mean, I was a good lefty.
I was a true believer in the system.
When I started this research, I wanted to exonerate the CDC and return to my work on Adam Smith that I had come down to Australia to study.
It brought me no joy to discover what I was finding.
But I would read a study, like this Flarenz study, the aluminum safety study that I'm referring to, and I would weep.
I would weep after reading the study and realizing how bad the scientific evidence was, and then what that tells us about the people working at CDC, FDA, and what that tells us about the state of science, the state of the regulatory agencies in America.
It was a level of horror that I was not prepared for, and emotionally, it was just devastating.
You know, all of us who have found something of this sort go through a process...
I don't even know what to describe it.
It's a process of alienation from the mythology that we are all brought into just as members of society.
Because what you find out...
I mean, it would be horrifying enough just to find out...
There was no science.
You're on your own.
There are lots of hazards.
You could easily find yourself maimed by intersecting with hazards and not properly preparing for it or whatever.
But that's not even the story.
The story is the system that is supposed to be keeping you safe has been drafted into cloaking hazards.
So that even normal reason and common sense is not sufficient for you to just simply stay away from stuff that's uncertain.
We are being led to believe that things are safe that are known not to be.
And then the problem is, as soon as you recognize that, then the presumption has to be that actually, no, that can't be.
You must have lost your mind.
Right, right.
I had that experience as well.
Yeah.
And so, you know, it's funny.
You travel amongst people who have had this experience on one topic or another at least, right?
And we've all just sort of gotten used to being looked at like we've lost our minds.
And, you know, that never becomes okay, but it becomes something you have to accept because the alternative is to blind yourself.
Right, right.
Which for some of us is impossible.
We're just not going to participate in it.
So, all right.
You've got vaccine adjuvants.
What fraction of the 27,000% increase would you say is the result of vaccine adjuvants?
Well, it's difficult to separate out adjuvants from the vaccines and vaccines from the total number of vaccines, this massive increase in the schedule.
So, just to backtrack for a minute, as most people know, but it's worth repeating, in 1986...
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act is passed and signed into law, gives liability protection to the pharmaceutical industry for vaccines.
So they cannot be sued for vaccine harms.
There's a special separate court system that's supposed to compensate the vaccine injured.
It doesn't work very well.
But when that happens...
Pharmaceutical companies rush to add as many vaccines to the schedule as possible because that's pure profit.
Every new vaccine added to the schedule generates $2 billion in profit.
And so the vaccine schedule...
$2 billion a year?
Per year.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's a massive amount of money.
And so the vaccine schedule increases greatly over that time period.
And the figure that I've used before was that it...
It's tripled or quadrupled, but it's actually more than that.
So in the early 1980s, kids would generally get about seven shots.
Today, it's in the 80s.
It's closer to 84 shots.
So that's more than a tenfold increase in the size of the schedule.
So it's difficult to separate out a particular ingredient from the vaccine itself, from the schedule, from the fact that the schedule has moved earlier and earlier.
That being said...
It was a very important study.
Sally Ozonoff came out in 2018, and she looked at this question of autistic regression, and the assumption had been that kids were born autistic, the genetic narrative, right?
But what parents described as happening is that the child was developing normally and then something happens.
It's rather sudden and abrupt.
And the child regresses.
And what regression means is they lose speech, eye contact, the ability to socialize with others, all the standard symptoms of autism.
And so what Sally Ozenoff was researching with her team was Well, what percent of all autism cases are autistic regression?
Yeah.
It's trying to separate who's born autistic versus regression.
And the assumption had been that autistic regression was rare.
And what Saliozanoff figured out through a very elegant study design is that up to 88% of autism cases are characterized by regression.
88%.
88%.
That's the higher end, but the lower bound is still in the 70s.
It's still pretty high.
So the child was developing normally, something happens, and then the child regresses.
Well, what autistic regression suggests is acute toxic exposure, a sudden overwhelming toxic exposure that overwhelms the body.
And what we know from the testimony of hundreds of thousands of parents...
Is that the acute toxic exposure, the event that preceded the autistic regression, was a child well-baby visit where the child received lots and lots of vaccines in one day, or even a single vaccine in one day, and that that was the trigger that led to the autistic regression.
So in terms of sorting out the relative contributions of the various toxicants that increase autism risk, I think we can say that The various toxicants that I've described before, coal-fired power plants, pesticides, plastics, and EMF, that's a tiny percentage of the total harms.
Up to 88% of autism cases may stem from the childhood vaccine schedule.
Okay, so when I hear that something between, you said 70...
7 and 88% of these autism cases involve developmental regression.
Do I have the numbers correct?
Yeah.
Upwards of 80%, but a range of sort of, let's say, 60% to 88%.
Okay.
That, of course, is a red herring, as you point out.
No, not a red herring.
That's a red flag.
Red flag.
Because it...
The developmental process should not be characterized by the loss of capacity that has already been gained.
You could imagine if you had a bad gene that caused something not to work correctly, you can imagine not attaining a benchmark.
But the loss of a capacity that has already been achieved suggests destruction of structures, right?
Development doesn't do that.
The loss of capacity should not happen until sexual maturity, at which point the pattern of the loss of capacity proceeds almost imperceptibly at first.
You know, several decades in the pattern of senescence is clear.
But to watch a child who's achieved benchmarks lose them is...
It's alarming in that it suggests that the child has had an encounter with something destructive.
The fact that the child has not had an encounter with something destructive in the outside world where they've, you know, encountered, they've drunk some kind of a cleaner, you know, that was under the sink or something, right?
A child who hasn't had any encounter other than, oh, well, they did go to the doctor and the doctor had this very...
You know, a fancy needle and some vials of stuff.
And what's in the vials?
Well, there's metals.
Why are the metals in there?
Oh, because it freaks the immune system out.
How is that safe?
Because the body excretes it.
How do we know that the body excretes it?
Oh, we tested it on some rabbits who didn't excrete it.
It's like, well, what story are you even telling me?
And none of this makes any sense, right?
Right.
So, the problem...
The problem is that the story in the end is so little known and ridiculous that, again, to tell it makes you sound like a mad person.
It makes you sound like you've lost your mind and you've started reading fanciful stuff.
But in fact, what were you reading?
You were reading primary sources in the literature that explain ostensibly how we know this stuff is safe and that the cause must be elsewhere.
Right?
Okay.
So, go ahead.
Well, can I backtrack for a second?
Because there's one additional point that I wanted to mention that's key to this whole discussion.
And I read your book with Heather, and I like the book quite a bit.
But let me...
Except for the sentence about the genius of the vet.
Well, let me add to it.
I actually think...
I don't disagree with it.
So...
So here's what I think people need to understand.
So when they say vaccine, they're actually referring to four or five different types of technology.
And it's not helpful to say vaccine because you need to say, well, are you referring to an attenuated live virus vaccine or to an adjuvanted dead virus vaccine or to the subunit vaccine where they take a piece of a cell and try to train the immune system to respond are you referring to an attenuated live virus vaccine or to an adjuvanted dead virus vaccine And then, you know, these more modern technologies and they combine several different antigens into a single vaccine.
So we're actually talking about four or five different technologies.
Each with different risk profiles.
Yep.
So look, I'm a social scientist critiquing the biosciences.
One must be very careful, humble and meticulous in doing that because otherwise you can quickly go astray.
So in all my research, I'm just reading the original source documents of other people.
And so, and I've read every vaccine safety study out there, nearly all vaccine safety studies out there.
And what I discovered is this very important data set.
So the Danish government has this long relationship with The country of Guinea-Bissau in Africa.
And there's been this health project in Guinea-Bissau for the last 40 years called the Bandim Health Project.
Peter Abe and Christine Stable-Ben are the Danish researchers who lead it.
And they have this data set of patients and all the vaccines administered to these patients.
It's a data set of 200,000 people, and it's a data set of 40 years.
And so these very honest researchers went back and looked at the research and looked at whether these vaccines caused benefit or caused harm.
Christine Stable-Ben does this TED Talk in Denmark.
It's one of the most gutsy, courageous TED Talks I've ever seen.
And she stands up in front of this audience and says, In our research, we found that of all these different classes, types of different vaccines, only the attenuated live virus vaccines produced more benefits than harms.
So literally she's talking about three vaccines.
Oral polio, measles by itself, and BCG, which is a tuberculosis vaccine.
Now what she's saying, also between the lines there, Is that every other type of vaccine that they studied causes more harms than benefits.
So all the adjuvanted vaccines cause more harms than benefits according to the best vaccine data set in the world.
Now here's the kicker though.
Oral polio, measles by itself, and BCG tuberculosis are not offered in the United States of America.
They are not on the U.S. childhood schedule.
Which means that every single shot, On the CDC's childhood schedule, according to the best vaccine dataset in the world, causes more harms than benefits.
But there's a reason for that.
The reason why attenuated live virus vaccines are not given in the United States is because, as you were indicating, you don't know what's going to happen with them in the population.
They may revert to being completely useless.
Or they may revert to virulence.
They may cause an outbreak of the very thing that they're supposed to protect against, which is what we see with oral polio vaccine.
And that's why the cases of polio that we see in the world right now are coming from the oral polio vaccine that's given in other countries.
No politician wants to be responsible.
For an outbreak of polio in their district.
And so what they do instead of giving the vaccine that actually might work, but may revert to virulence, they don't want to take that risk, they give the ineffective vaccine that causes more harms than benefits.
That's the system that we live under, is that theoretically, some attenuated live virus vaccines may provide benefit.
None of those are available in the United States.
None of those are on the childhood schedule.
According to the best vaccine researcher in the world, all of the vaccines on the CDC's childhood schedule cause more harms than benefits, according to the best data set on vaccine benefits and harms in the world.
It's just an astonishing reality to comprehend.
It's absolutely astonishing.
I will say I'm heartened by your description because Heather and I have felt We're bad for having misunderstood and given vaccines not only a pass, but a strong recommendation in our book.
But this does match exactly what our understanding was, which is that this is an elegant technology based in the Jenner observation about cowpox.
The Jenner observation is about an attenuated virus vaccine.
Hey, this is not a freebie kind of immunity.
This is actually a sobering gamble on creating immunity by inducing infection of a kind that is preferable to the one that you are trying to stave off.
The fact that that is unavoidably fraught with the danger that evolution will do something to your plans that you do not expect.
And therefore, this should not be a regular feature.
This should be something that we do rarely when we have very good reason to think that the risks are justified by the benefit, not as a matter of well baby visits, right?
This is something, this is a technology we should save for a rainy day when there's actually something.
To be very concerned about.
And we have something sufficiently safe to use this live pathogen to induce the immune system to do what it was built to do.
Not a metal that freaks the immune system out randomly and causes chaos at best.
And for which the body has no built-in program for dealing with it because your ancestors didn't...
Right, right.
And I would add, you can't vaccinate into a pandemic, though, because the horse has already left the barn.
It's too late by that point.
It's already, the virus is already in the community.
That's not the best use of it either.
So as far as the case in which is the appropriate use, it's pretty narrow.
And then, Historically, we actually had a sort of attenuated live virus vaccine system just through natural exposures from being around family and playing in the dirt.
And there's microbes in the soil and there's all sorts of exposures, micro exposures happening over time.
The body is wise.
The immune system develops.
Immunity to various things in the environment in the absence of vaccines, just through natural exposures as well.
And I think we've gotten to this point where we sanitize everything and we treat it with chemicals, and children don't live in a very microbial-rich environment anymore, and I think their health suffers as a result.
Yeah, and I think we know that it does.
The hygiene hypothesis for allergies and asthma is pretty well established.
You know, the more it's a rabbit hole and you fall down it.
And, you know, I know that one of my toughest moments in coming to understand that vaccine technology is not what I had thought it was, was the discovery through Forrest Moretti's book, The Moth and the Iron Lung, that the polio story wasn't what I thought it was.
Because the mythology of polio is that you had this Absolutely frightening condition.
And it is an absolutely frightening condition, right?
Terrified children, crippled, forced to live in an iron lung just simply to be able to, you know, to take a breath.
It could hardly be worse.
But in reading his book, I came to understand that that story It wasn't what I thought it was, and because it's not what I thought it was, it does not give a sense for, yes, there are some very scary pathogens out there, and we need to have a plan, and we need to be ready to accept some pretty serious downsides in order to fend off something really awful like polio.
Now, to cut to the chase, and for my viewers, I did an interview with Forrest Moretti, and you can hear it from him.
But the basic point is it's not that there's no poliovirus.
There is a poliovirus.
That poliovirus, however, does not cause polio without a toxic exposure in children.
It's a harmless, not harmless, not totally harmless, but nearly harmless enterovirus that causes a little sickness in the gut, nothing you would write home about or even see the doctor over, unless the gut has been breached by metals.
And so the problem is we all carry the story of polio as an indicator that, well, we better have some pretty fancy tech because there's some pretty scary stuff out there.
Well, what are the stories that tell us that?
Smallpox is one story.
Why do we not have epidemics of smallpox anymore?
Is that the triumph of the vaccines?
Or is that the fact that there are no naive populations anymore, that that immunity has actually been generally acquired?
The pathogen doesn't exist, but harboring the fear of a smallpox epidemic is not an obviously right thing to do.
The reason that smallpox played the role that it did was that you actually had novel exposures, right?
In a world where everybody's traveling, the number, you know, yes, we've got lots of novel colds, novel flus every year, but these don't kill people who aren't profoundly infirm or very old.
The story of Spanish flu also stands out as a frightening, you know, flu that pops out of nowhere is killing, you know, GIs, healthy people back from the front, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That story also isn't what we all think it is.
That story is predicated on...
The pathogen doing the killing, and it's missing two elements.
One, secondary infection, bacterial pneumonias that today would be easily treated with antibiotics, and overdosing of patients with aspirin, which was the new wonder drug, and was given to people suffering from Spanish flu in doses that we now know are deadly.
So anyway, the point is, you've got a bunch of stories that tell us that We've got to be ready to do some pretty serious stuff to be immune because there's some pretty frightening stuff out there.
And the stories are not informative in the way that we think they are.
The technologies are not what we think they are, right?
The Jenner story of the heroic, you know, vaccine is a story at best about a heroic live attenuated vaccine that does not tell us a heroic story about an adjuvant-based killed virus vaccine.
The experience of waking up to this story is one of, actually, there is a false mythology that leads us to feel that we are scientifically informed about the risks that we face and the available advantages that we can take to protect ourselves.
And none of it stands up to scrutiny.
Is that a fair assessment?
It is, but that's not accidental.
This false mythology that we've been given is this very well-crafted, expensive piece of propaganda and public relations created by the pharmaceutical industry pumped out to us on a regular basis through the mass media, through the schools, through what have you.
This narrative that we grew up with...
It's there because it's very profitable to tell that false story.
And, you know, society likes it because it gives a false sense of comfort and security in an uncertain world.
But this is the result of one of the largest, most expensive propaganda campaigns in human history.
And the reason people are accepting a false story is because the pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars planting that false story in the minds of most Americans.
Now, there are a lot of bitter pills in this.
One of them is that I think a lot of us who have traveled these roads like to think, well, the product, Of that propaganda campaign is something like evil.
It's destroying, severely compromising the lives of millions of children who would have been healthy and had normal lives if they hadn't faced this.
But the people involved, they're mistaken.
They think they're doing the right thing.
They think the cost-benefit analysis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And while I'm sure that that's true for the average employee, the average scientist involved in this, it can't really be true for the people directing it.
In other words, in order to create a propaganda campaign that covers a harm this massive so that each new generation of children gets injected with these things.
You have to know what it is you're covering.
So what do you end up thinking about the culpability of those involved?
It's so difficult.
I've wrestled with this question for a long time, and I still don't have an answer that I can live with.
It's still a mess.
So how does CAPTCHA work?
We know that money's involved.
We know this revolving door between FDA, CDC, NIH, and the pharmaceutical industry.
We know that the various bureaucrats are auditioning for a job with the pharmaceutical industry when they push these vaccines through.
But I've watched these people, I've talked with these people, these regulators, the bureaucrats.
They seem to be true believers.
It's not like on The Symptoms or in a movie where there's these evildoers who look like evildoers who know that they're doing harm.
These are true believers.
The mechanism by which someone goes from having a financial conflict of interest to believing what they have done is justified and true and good.
I don't understand well.
I think it happens fairly quickly.
But I don't think the cognitive dissonance lasts very long.
I think capture happens on this cultural level, happens on a psychological level, and that the people doing harm convince themselves that they're virtuous.
And that's part of the mystery that we have to unravel as well, that there's some social dynamic here.
Where they come to believe that their actions that are causing harm are actually virtuous and good and unquestionable.
And it's this sort of perverse psychology that I cannot adequately explain at this point.
All right.
Well, let me try a version of it on you.
I learned...
I think many of us had something like a graduate education in various things, in epidemiology, virology, fifth generation warfare.
COVID was a graduate education in some landscape that many of us knew very little about until we ended up thrown together trying to understand what we were facing.
I become increasingly suspicious Utilitarianism is what it used to be called.
The modern version of it is rationalism.
The more virulent version of rationalism is called effective altruism.
And I believe that this style of thinking has infected a great many people.
And the problem with it is not that the argument isn't sound.
I understand the argument for utilitarianism.
And I understand...
Why rationalists aspire to a world in which you prune out the emotional distractions that lead you to ineffective action in the world and you look at the whole thing as a dispassionate exercise in trying to maximize something.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It doesn't work.
And it doesn't work for a number of reasons.
There's no appreciation for the difference between a complicated system in which you could maximize some value through careful action and a complex system in which you can aspire to do that, but you're going to be upended by all the things you don't know again and again and again.
In the case of COVID, I think there are some true villains.
Anthony Fauci strikes me as a true villain.
But I think most of the people who participated in the COVID crimes were well-intentioned.
They imagined that there was something to be accomplished, that it was not accomplishable if they shared the full complexity with us.
And so they engaged in a This impossibly baroque network of noble lies, where they told us things that they knew weren't true, but in their own minds what they said was, we'll be better off if people believe that they are simply true, right?
These vaccines are safe and effective.
Well, is any vaccine safe completely?
No.
So we need people to take them because more good will be done than harm if people take them.
So we're going to stay safe because that causes the maximum amount of good, blah, blah, blah.
That style of thinking resulted in globally many millions of dead needlessly from vaccines, so-called vaccines, that didn't help them or couldn't have helped them because, frankly, they were young enough and healthy enough that COVID wasn't a threat, right?
Those people should never have been injected.
I don't think anybody should have been injected, but certainly people who stood to gain nothing because they would very easily have faced COVID and come through it fine.
Those people should never have been injected.
So millions of people dead as a result of a bad vaccine technology deployed without proper safety testing.
Tens of millions, hundreds of millions injured by those same shots.
My point would be utilitarianism.
Effective altruism, rationalism, public health, which is a version of this.
We're going to aid the population.
We're going to avail ourselves of the right to lie nobly, blah, blah, blah.
The debt that that style of thinking now has in a way that we can establish it is millions of dead, tens to hundreds of millions injured.
That is a huge error.
My feeling is you don't get to deploy this style of thinking when you haven't even acknowledged how much harm it did.
And once you did acknowledge how much harm it did, you'd have to say, well, yeah, in theory we could do a lot of good if we could deploy this kind of rational thinking, but the track record suggests it ain't ready for prime time for sure.
So anyway, my point was going to be, I will bet you, I won't bet you, but I would hypothesize that inside these corporations, this transition that you say is sudden where people sign up for something that then causes them to participate in this ongoing evil,
that they probably have a not For public consumption version of the story that is itself garbage, but causes them to appear willing to lie in a way that,
yes, is going to maim huge numbers of people and looks inexplicable to us unless they don't care, when really their point is, hey, we've got this private analysis that says this many lives are going to be saved, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And yes, we understand that there's harm, but, you know.
There's benefit and there's cost.
And the benefit so far exceeds the cost that we are entitled to tell any lie.
We are entitled to hire people to engage in propaganda, to lie straight into the face of the parent of an injured child and say, our vaccines didn't cause this because in the end, you know, okay, yes, your child was injured, but somebody else's child lived or something like that.
Does that sound plausible to you?
I think that's an elegant theory.
Yeah, and I just use the simpler...
Term of managerialism, but it's more pernicious than that, right?
It's this crisis of expertise.
It's this notion that I know better than you.
It's class-based.
It's this certain educated class that thinks that they know better than everyone else, and they can tell society what to do.
I think it's colonial.
Utilitarianism goes back to managing a colonial empire where you're sacrificing a certain number of the indigenous people for the profits of empire and the greater good of England, Europe, America, what have you.
It's so dark at the end of the day, this notion that some expert...
Some manager, some bureaucrat is going to decide the fate of other people and that's their right to make that decision.
I think you are right to call out utilitarianism and that I think on some level it's deeply un-American.
It's deeply un-American to not allow people to make their own decisions and not trust in the wisdom and...
Personal sovereignty of every individual.
I think we need to call that out everywhere we can because it's at the root of this crisis.
And dismantling that set of bad ideas, I think, is going to reduce the carnage and the harm.
And look, you and I both believe ideas have consequences.
And in this case, this sort of outdated, corruptible, elitist...
This philosophy has led to millions and millions of deaths from these terrible COVID shots.
It's led to disability of millions from children who develop autism.
I think it's at the root of so much of this.
Well, which brings me to an interesting set of questions that are not fundamentally medical or biological.
Think of ourselves as liberals.
And not classical liberals, but people...
Modern left liberals.
We come from the modern left.
I'm beginning to think that every single one of these, and I don't think of myself as left because I think the left is correct.
I think the left is a necessary ingredient.
And somebody has to do the job of the left.
And I feel better able to do the job of the left.
I see the left questions better.
I'm more in tune with them.
So I want to do my role and pull in that direction because I think it needs to be done responsibly and I'm just better at that one.
But I'm wondering if all of these Philosophical bents that we have inherited from the 18th century or whatever it is, are not ready for their 2.0 version.
And I can say this, and I have said this about libertarians, that there is a way in which I used to think libertarianism was the most ridiculous, cartoonish viewpoint of all.
And I've come to understand that actually libertarians have something right.
Almost perfectly.
And then they've got a bunch of nonsense that travels along with it, and I would love to see the thing that they've got right, which is that liberty is the value you should seek to maximize individual liberty, that there are good reasons to maximize individual liberty, that it is elegant because it forces you to solve, to balance all of your other trade-offs.
So anyway, I'm on board with libertarians, but I'm frustrated that they have this sort of childish...
I want whatever system maximally liberates people, they become obsessed with deregulating, and sometimes regulations actually do liberate.
A regulation that says everybody should drive on the right side of the road does involve a small surrender of liberty, but it massively liberates you because you can travel at 60 miles an hour rather than 6 miles an hour because everybody's agreed.
To restrain themselves.
So anyway, I think the libertarians need an upgrade.
I think the conservatives need an upgrade.
That there's a lot of threat to things that we actually did accomplish and understand.
And those things need to be protected vigorously because our well-being depends on continuing to do the stuff that we've got right into the future and not just upending stuff because we can.
But I also think liberals need an upgrade too.
And it is interesting that you and I find ourselves opposed to this medical utopian perspective about how we're going to use technology to make ourselves safe and to upgrade people by informing their immune systems, all of that.
That is, in its own way, a failure of a liberal mindset.
Liberals are obsessed with solving problems, which is a good obsession.
Problems should be solved.
The thing that liberals do not do well is appreciate how often what works out on paper does more harm than good when you try to deploy it because of all the things you don't know.
The unintended consequences are the thing that should cause us to have trepidations about liberal problem solving.
This is exactly that case.
We can solve the problem of pathogenic disease.
Well, you can certainly make it better.
You can make it a lot better by washing your hands, by having municipal sewage treatment.
You can do a tremendous amount of good.
But you're going to get there inside the human body and tinker the immune system, and you're sure that this is a net benefit.
And what's more, you're going to inject a child with...
70 of these things?
And you're certain that you're not, you know, expending the capacity?
How do you even know what the net consequence of that is?
So, anyway, what I'm hoping that you'll respond to is, as a liberal who's discovered what is, in effect, a runaway desire to solve problems that has instead caused massive harms that we won't even face.
Do you see the contradiction?
And what does it tell you about your own liberalism?
Yeah, so for me, the paradox of liberalism in the autism epidemic and in the COVID crisis is that, I think I've got this right, but in my head it's that liberalism is both A problem and a potential remedy at the same time.
And here's what I mean by that.
And here, I'm referring to classical liberalism, and I'll deal with modern left liberalism as well in a moment.
But you do your thing, I'll do mine thing is sort of the essence of classical liberalism.
But what happens over time is that firms that do well in the market End up buying up their competitors.
You end up having oligopolies and monopolies.
And what happens is it's cheaper to buy the state than it is to innovate.
Yes.
So these small companies, you start off with a liberal marketplace.
There's competition.
Competition's good for everybody.
Leads to innovation.
It doesn't last long.
There's winners and losers.
The companies that win buy the smaller companies.
You end up with monopolies and oligopolies.
Then they buy the state.
And that's what's happened with the pharmaceutical industry.
So perhaps once upon a time they were innovating.
They haven't innovated in over 40 years.
They haven't innovated since the 1980 Bi-Dol Act.
Because basically it became cheaper to buy the regulators and to buy the state than to innovate and create new products.
Because look, pharmaceutical research is very difficult.
And so there's a reason why the pharmaceutical industry spends 20 times more money on marketing and PR than they do on research and development.
Well, the reason is because you get a better return on investment for doing that.
It's a guaranteed return on investment.
And so you have monopolies and oligopolies buying up the regulatory agencies, buying up the state.
And then rigging the rules of the game.
So now we're no longer in a liberal context, right?
We're not in a classical liberal context.
We're in a system of monopoly capitalism, global monopoly capitalism.
And they say, we're going to mandate your child get these 84 shots in order to go to school.
That's not a marketplace, right?
We're no longer in a marketplace.
This is not liberalism that we live under.
So then the remedy becomes liberalism.
Let people make their own decisions.
Let people follow their own conscience.
Let the market decide.
Restore liability so that the courts can weigh in against toxic products so people can sue people who have harmed them.
Return to an actual marketplace.
Return to some sort of system where people can make their own decisions.
So as far as modern left liberalism, what we sometimes call progressivism, It started as a reaction against the excesses of the market, right?
So, tainted meat, contamination in the food supply, that sort of thing.
Progressives, funded by, you know, millionaires at the time, Rockefellers and whatnot, said, we can do better as a society.
We can create the regulatory state.
And that's going to take the edge off of capitalism.
And that's going to leave us with a system with some competition, but...
But without the downside of capitalism.
That was the promise of progressivism in the early 1900s that was the forerunner to what we think of as the modern Democrat.
And what the modern Democrat fails to recognize is that the regulatory state has completely failed.
So just as monopoly capitalism is at the root of so much harm here and we don't have a marketplace, The left loves, has completely failed.
FDA, CDC, NIH, EPA have all completely failed.
They now work for industry.
So we have this merger now of corporations and the state, and the left, modern Democrats refuse to have a conversation about the way that the regulatory state has been captured, the way that the regulatory state works with modern Democrats refuse to have a conversation about the way that the regulatory state has been captured, the way that the regulatory state works with corporations now, the way that we don't have a marketplace, the way
That cause death, that will cause the collapse of the United States in our lifetime if we don't do something about this.
That's at the root of all of this.
So the modern progressive that intended to fix the limitations of the state and of capitalism has a blind spot in not recognizing the state.
Okay, beautiful.
You've got a failure of the problem-solving scientific progressive in recognizing the difficulty in actually improving human health through intervention.
You've got a failure of the governmental problem-solving liberal in recognizing what has become of the regulatory state.
It's a question of rationalizing the failure of...
It's exactly what liberals do badly.
They come up with something they think is a solution and they fail to recognize in which way it has become more harm than benefit.
You have a failure of not only Conservatives, but especially those who see the beauty of the market, because people who see the beauty of the market, and it really is a very effective way of solving many different kinds of problems, fail to appreciate when markets don't work, right?
They fail to appreciate what fraction of what appears to be productive behavior is actually parasitic and predatory, and that's exactly what's happened here.
But you mentioned something in your last answer that we've not covered, which is my fault.
You mentioned the collapse of civilization based in autism.
That's going to sound preposterous to most people.
But I know, having watched your talk, what you're talking about.
Do you want to fill in where the threat comes from?
Yeah, so...
I did a deep dive into the costs of autism early in my research, and at the time there were just three good societal cost of autism studies.
By now there are about nine, but at the time there were three.
We know that autism increases poverty and inequality, as usually one parent, often the mom, leaves the workforce to become a full-time caregiver.
We know that autism costs more than Heart disease, cancer, and stroke combined.
And that's because autism is a lifelong condition.
It usually starts in childhood.
It's over the entire lifespan, whereas those other conditions are late in life.
And then there's a very good study from 2015 that showed that autism cost the U.S. in 2015. So this is nine years ago.
$268 billion per year.
That's billion with a B. $268 billion per year back in 2015. By now, it's well over $300 billion per year.
By the end of the decade, we'll surpass a trillion dollars per year in autism.
What are those costs?
Autism increases costs in all sorts of different ways.
So medical costs are higher for people on the spectrum because they're dealing with a lot of comorbid.
Conditions, whether that's gut issues, pain, various other comorbid conditions, the seizures are common that go along with autism.
So you'll see increased costs there.
Educational costs go up.
Educational costs double as you add another, you know, an assistant in the classroom or a personal assistant or a private school for the child.
And then...
You see costs as far as a lot of...
Most people on the spectrum don't end up getting a job, don't end up working, and so there's lost earnings for that person over a lifetime.
There's lost earnings for the parents as well as parents leave the workforce and become caregivers.
And then as the costs change over time...
So in childhood, you're seeing increased medical costs and increased educational costs.
As they age, age out of the educational system, the costs shift to become things like housing costs.
As the parents of these children eventually retire and die, and now the state has to care for people on the spectrum who don't.
Have living parents anymore.
And so the costs shift over time.
And so a study I did with Mark Blacksell and Cynthia Nevison on projecting the long-term costs of autism out into 2050 and beyond shows this fiscal cliff that's coming.
So right now we have what we call the 1986 generation.
These are the parents of the children.
Who developed autism following the 1986 Act.
Those are the first big wave of autism families.
Well, they're getting older.
Now, there's even more autism cases coming down the pipeline.
But as they get older, costs that are currently born by parents are going to shift onto the state in terms of housing costs.
That's the bulk of the cost.
But care costs, food, all the rest.
And the state has no plan for how to meet those additional housing costs as the 1986 generation ages.
And at the same time, prevalence rates continue to go up and up and up.
The latest studies out of California show a 4.6% autism rate in California.
Autism is higher in boys than amongst girls, so we're seeing over 7%.
Autism rate in boys.
The autism rate is higher in Black and Hispanic boys than in Anglo-Caucasian boys.
And so we're seeing 8% to 10% autism rates in Black and Hispanic boys for Black and Hispanic boys born from 2016 and later.
That's just off the charts.
It's never before been seen in humanity.
And it's absolutely...
Catastrophic for these individuals, for these families, and for society.
Now, let me be clear.
The remedy for all of this is to stop putting toxic chemicals in kids.
The remedy for all this is to stop poisoning kids.
It's very straightforward.
We could stop this crisis in 24 hours if we had the political will.
You can stop adding to the crisis.
Yeah, there would be...
Certain costs that are baked in, but you would stop producing new cases.
Exactly.
And that's what we have to do.
What instead is happening, particularly in California, where I'm from, is that Democrats refuse to have a conversation about what's happening, refuse to turn and face the problem, refuse to acknowledge their own culpability in this crisis, and instead they do weird things, like these vaccine mandate bills, that...
Kick people out of school for not following the rules.
But what ends up happening, here's what you need to understand about the vaccine mandate bills that the pharmaceutical industry pushes in nearly all 50 states, is families often have many children, two or three, let's say.
Within that family, the older child gets vaccine injured.
The parents stop vaccinating.
And their second and third children do not have autism.
They're not vaccine-injured.
So you have these mixed families with one sibling who's vaccine-injured, usually with autism, other siblings who are not vaccine-injured.
When you pass a vaccine mandate bill that says everybody has to be vaccinated in order to go to school, ordinarily, this family that's not vaccinating, their two unvaccinated kids could keep going to school.
But these families become medical refugees.
They exit the state because their kids can't go to school anymore.
So what you actually do in the process is you kick autistic families out of the state.
They have to leave because the other siblings can't go to school.
And the family's not vaccinating the autistic child anymore either.
So by not facing the problem, Democrats do these weird things.
Like vaccine mandate bills that create medical refugees that shift some of the cost to other states.
To other states, which may not at all be accidental.
In fact, the whole idea of creating an autism problem that then exports itself so that the problem appears to be less intense than it actually is may be a feature, not a bug.
Maybe.
All right.
Well, so did you complete your...
A discussion of the threat, the financial.
You've talked a little bit about the massive hidden costs of the autism epidemic.
How does this pose a threat to civilization and over what time scale?
It poses a threat right now.
So, within a decade, or by the end of the decade, I should say, autism costs in the U.S. will surpass U.S. Defense Department costs.
And there's no plan whatsoever to meet those costs.
And autism is just one of more than 10 chronic medical conditions that we're seeing across society.
And they each have their own costs as well.
So the cost of the chronic disease epidemic in children and now adults, where over 60% of the population has one or more chronic conditions, is going to become the largest share of the federal budget.
It's going to keep growing until it overwhelms.
All facets of society.
It impacts military readiness.
It impacts tax collections because you're not raising as much revenue because people aren't working as much.
It impacts innovation.
Every facet of society breaks down under the weight and the cost of vaccine injury.
There is no facet of society that is not impacted by This mass poisoning event that we're in the midst of.
And the irony of this, you compare it to the defense budget.
The defense budget is there to protect Americans from serious threats.
And yet we have this serious threat that is about to overtake The military in terms of the expense.
The threat is here.
It's measurable.
It's comprehensible.
And frankly, it's readily addressable.
And so we're spending, I don't know what the defense budget is.
800 some billion.
800 billion dollars a year.
We're spending 800 billion dollars a year to protect ourselves.
But we've left the back door open and our children are being injured in massive numbers.
Profoundly in a way that threatens the very capability of society to continue, and we're not noticing.
The contradiction there is ironic and profound.
And that may be a story of evil, or it may be a story of evil, combined with the fact that the decision-makers, many of them may be vaccine-injured as well, particularly the military decision-makers.
They're not making good decisions.
They're not thinking clearly.
They're not solving problems.
They're not thinking critically.
It's this crisis that is just, the scale is unimaginable.
Unimaginable.
Well, let us hope that in the era of Make America Healthy Again, that we collectively have the courage to look at this terrifying problem and To not flinch from the obvious implications because the thing that I always focus on is people are unwilling to look at these
things because they don't want to admit what's happened.
But not admitting what's happened means doing it to people who aren't injured yet.
And our obligation to not harm people who have so far not had this inflicted upon them Trump's everything else, right?
We have an absolute obligation to those people, and we have to look at what we've allowed to happen in order to protect them.
And it's one thing if you don't know, but the fact is the evidence is there.
And if we don't know now, it's because we've avoided asking the question.
So, Toby Rogers.
I greatly appreciate the work that you've been doing, your courage in facing these awful questions, and the tremendous care that you exhibit in trying to bring the public's attention to them.
So thank you very much.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate everything that you're doing and your ability to get the word out and make these really complicated issues more clear in the minds of...
The public and policy makers and I'm so grateful for everything that you do and everything that Heather does and I'm just glad to be in this fight alongside you.
