July 7, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:13
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| If you just think about one-time vaccine, you could argue that the amount of mercury in a single dose of a single vaccine is probably small, and you could argue potentially that it poses no significant risks. | |
| The problem is that you don't take one shot, you take actually a shot every year. | |
| And moreover, you are actually being exposed to mercury from other sources in your life, from food, from fish, from other sources. | |
| So when you want to consider risk here, you need to adopt a system-level kind of thinking and really think about not only this isolated episode, but rather than what is the overall contribution to the overall risk, to the overall exposure. | |
| And if you do that, I think it's going to be sensible that given the fact that mercury is a highly toxic compound, nobody debates that, and it accumulates in the body. | |
| I think it's going to be sensible, at least in my mind, to say that if we can control and eliminate some controllable sources of mercury, we should do that. | |
| Speaking more broadly, and because you also asked about the efficacy of flu vaccines, I think it's again an area where I think the current evidence that we have is rather low quality. | |
| And again, we are thinking about this question only year by year. | |
| Like every year, we're trying to assess the efficacy of the vaccine in that year, which is important, but I don't think it's sufficient. | |
| And the issues that Robert alluded to of what is the long-term impact of using multiple doses every year is super important because at the end of the day, we are not managing one year, we are managing an horizon of years. | |
| And we really want to think about essentially the immune profile of the population. | |
| And to some extent, that immune profile is the shield for the most vulnerable people in our population, right? | |
| To some extent, the more resilience the immune profile of the population is, the less chance there is for the virus to hit the most vulnerable people. | |
| And it might be tempting to think that vaccinating everybody with the same vaccine every year is the best strategy. | |
| But I think there is actually quite a lot of evidence that suggests that that might not be the case. | |
| And I'm not sure that we have been thinking deeply enough about this to know or to figure out what the right answer is. | |
| Now, the other thing that I would like to say, I think that in order to answer this question, like many other safety and efficacy questions, we cannot just look on observational data from the field. | |
| We also need to look on research that is conducted to understand the biological mechanisms that take place once we vaccinate people. | |
| I know that there are great concerns about potential radical changes that this committee would recommend or would cause. | |
| And on the other hand, there is maybe an impatience by others that radical changes have to happen immediately. | |
| My philosophy in life, and actually I teach that when I teach in courses that I teach, I usually tell people that if you want to change something, the first thing that you need to do is to fully and very deeply understand why it's set up the way it is. | |
| So you have to take the time to understand before you make changes. | |
| We are going to be very, very thoughtful and thorough in first understanding why people make decisions the way they are now before we are going to recommend changes and what changes are we going to recommend. |
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