Lydia Green, co-founder of Back to the Vax, details her 2008 shift from breastfeeding support groups to antivaccination beliefs after dismissing her daughter’s D-Tap reaction as harm. COVID-19 shattered her trust—her son’s severe illness and debunked "blood-brain barrier" myths forced reexamination, revealing how predatory narratives exploit psychology, not stupidity. Intelligence fuels overconfidence in flawed data, like the disproven vaccine-autism link, while cult-like movements weaponize shame and social rejection. Now, she advocates gradual exposure to facts, not confrontation, through her podcast and Facebook group for hesitant parents, proving even deep-seated misinformation can unravel with evidence and empathy. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I have a special guest today.
I will allow her to introduce herself.
So go ahead, Lydia.
Hi, my name is Lydia Green.
I co-run a movement called Back to the Vax with my partner, Heather Simpson, who is from Texas.
I am from Alberta, and I used to be an anti-vaxxer.
And when COVID happened, I did some deep self-reflection and changed my mind.
Yeah, that's more or less the gist of what I get.
I've listened to the first 10 episodes of your podcast.
Whoa, thanks.
I actually listened to one of yours in the car.
I went out of town for some school shopping and I listened to the one conspiracy theory.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the most popular one.
Yeah.
Conspiracy hypothesis.
Yes, conspiracy hypothesis.
Yeah.
So yeah, I just start off.
Maybe if you could get a little more in detail of your road to becoming anti-vax and then maybe your road to believing anti-vax.
Sure.
It was a long time ago.
I wouldn't say, I mean, the anti-vax movement has been around since smallpox vaccination.
So I wouldn't say I'm an OG anti-vax person, but definitely started before COVID and before even the swine flu thing where people turned a lot of people anti-vax.
Back in 2008, I had my daughter.
And before having her, I was very pro-science.
I worked as a quality control chemist for a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
And I did everything I was supposed to.
I went to my prenatal appointments.
I got a flu shot while pregnant.
And it wasn't until after having her that I started getting into these natural parenting groups.
One in particular that a lot of people know is mothering.com.
They call it natural and attachment parenting.
And after having my daughter, I struggled with breastfeeding.
And I went to the doctor and he didn't really offer much help other than to say, you know, if it doesn't work out, don't be so brokenhearted about it.
And I kind of left that appointment feeling a little dejected.
And I went online and these mothers helped me.
They gave me advice that worked.
I was able to salvage the breastfeeding relationship I had with my newborn infant.
And it kind of helped, it kind of earned my trust, you know, having this wisdom imparted that actually worked.
And fast forward to her two-month vaccine appointment.
I may have been exposed to some anti-vax thinking, but I was still planning to vaccinate my child at that point.
But I remember sitting in the waiting room and feeling this trepidation creep over me of like, what if I vaccinate her and it goes wrong?
I cannot undo this.
I cannot remove this from her body.
I just have to deal with whatever happens.
And my husband kind of calmed me down.
He said, you know, why?
They're here to, they're here to help kids be healthy.
Like, why would they do something to harm your child?
And I said, right, yeah.
And we moved forward with the vaccinations.
And by that evening, she was inconsolable.
She was crying and screaming this high-pitched cry as she stopped nursing.
I know it took every ounce of effort to just even like express milk into her mouth just so she would have a couple of sips.
Like it was scary.
And then she would sleep this deep sleep and it scared me.
And so the following morning, after being up all night with her, I called public health and I explained what was happening.
And again, just like my first experience with the doctor, you know, is basically you're a first-time mom.
This, you know, it seemed, it did, it wasn't helpful.
It wasn't a fruitful discussion.
I still was worried about my child, but also felt silly and humiliated at the same time.
And I didn't feel like I had my questions answered about her response to vaccination.
And so I went back online to the same group that helped me before.
And what they showed me scared the living crap out of me.
You know, they showed me all these vaccine inserts that talked about D-Tap cry and encephalitis and how that looks like a high-pitched cry.
And that if your kid has these reactions, you should, you know, they should not get another D-TAP vaccine ever again.
And then shared, you know, YouTube videos of parents who's, you know, claiming vaccine injury and all this.
And it scared me enough to pause and reconsider vaccination, specifically with D-Tap at the time.
But the more I became involved in these groups, I became more afraid of other vaccines as well.
So at her four-month appointment, I had skipped D-Tap, but did the other two vaccines she was due for.
But by six months, I canceled the appointment and never went back.
So my daughter remained unvaccinated after that four-month appointment she had.
Right.
And that's how I, that's how I kind of fell into that group.
Yeah.
Just, if you don't mind, do you feel any anxiety when you kind of think about that or remember that?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't, you know, you feel, it's easy to forget exact words people said to you or whatever, but you never, you never forget how you feel.
Yeah.
Never forget how something made you feel.
And yeah, it was an awful feeling watching her breathe as she slept and worrying that, you know, what if this if this kills her, like, what if it's, what if they say it's SIDS and then I'll never know or, you know, just like all the things that people told me about vaccination just kind of floated around my head as I waited.
And she did come out of it.
Like, I think after the second night or so, she was returning to her normal self and continued to be a healthy child.
So, but I mean, that fear definitely sticks with you.
Yeah.
So then what happened?
I went on to have two more children.
And I stayed in these, you know, crunchy groups where we would talk about, I never got into homeopathy because as a person that was, you know, a former chemist, it never made sense to me how nothing can do something other than, you know, maybe placebo or just something naturally resolving with time.
So that just, I kind of thought that was hokey, but you know, like herbs and these like natural treatments, you know, I kind of let myself believe that this, there was a plausible mechanism there and it made sense and that, you know, big pharma was bad and these, you know, naturopaths and people that, you know, believe this sort of thing were onto something.
And I, so I stayed in those, you know, circles for quite some time.
I developed orthorexia, which is an eating disorder that is really common in wellness groups.
And I felt incredible shame anytime I used a medication on myself or my children.
Not to say that I never did, but when I did, I just felt like a failure.
And like a failure to be healthy naturally.
Yeah.
Cause it's, it's, it's not both.
It's if you follow this, you know, then you're treating the root cause.
And if you're sick, it's your own fault.
And I'm sure there's reasons why that appealed to my psychology, you know, like, whether that's my own upbringing or whatever, but I just, I just felt like if I could control enough variables that everything would be perfect.
And it really came from this wanting a sense of control.
Yeah.
Well, don't we all, right?
Yeah.
So then how did you come to be no longer anti-vax?
How did that happen in your mind?
Uh, so I was watching COVID start as I'm sure everyone else was and the entire world all at once.
Yeah.
7 billion heads turning to the left all at once.
Yeah.
And seeing some strange things happen that I'd never seen in my life definitely made me pause.
Like I, in our grocery store, they were putting limits on what you could buy.
Like you could only buy one pack of chicken and one carton of milk.
And I was like, that is almost like a ration.
Yeah.
They were rationing and that was weird.
And then toilet paper, for whatever reason, people panicked about and that was disappearing off shelves.
And just people seemed really uneasy.
And that made me uneasy.
And then also, like, again, back to my own upbringing.
I am the daughter of refugees from the former Yugoslavia and grew up with a distrust in government anyway.
And I still don't trust the government.
A lot of people.
Yeah, exactly.
But just thinking of how, you know, my parents, their money became worthless.
You know, they're back in Yugoslavia several times and within mass inflation and just knowing that, you know, in other communist countries and other areas, you know, the economy has collapsed completely.
And so did health care and so did other things.
And that started making me think because I wasn't one to think that vaccines totally didn't work, although there are anti-vaxxers that believe that as well.
I just thought, well, maybe now is the time to consider a few vaccines.
Like, what if I can't access clean water and, you know, like infrastructure starts to fall apart or whatever.
Preventative medicine now might be useful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I started like entertaining the idea of one or two vaccines for the more, what I thought were the more serious diseases, like measles and diphtheria and whatnot.
And in my research, I was looking for when it was safe to vaccinate my youngest because I believed this trope that the blood-brain barrier doesn't form until the age of two or three without actually researching it.
There was other things I kind of dug into, but for whatever reason, that made sense to me.
And I never really looked further into it.
So I'm trying to find this arbitrary age where I can safely vaccinate my youngest.
And it doesn't exist.
There's no research saying that anywhere.
And babies are born with an intact blood barrier.
Like we know that.
One hopes so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I was like, that is okay.
Like, I'm wrong.
I'm really wrong about this.
Like, how did I believe this for so long?
And I'm extremely wrong about it.
And so that's what that was the first instance where I really had to look at everything I had believed over the years.
Like, what else could be wrong?
And so I started digging into all these tropes that I wholeheartedly believed about vaccination.
But I stepped out of the echo chamber.
Instead of asking these questions in the echo chamber, I stepped out and I went into some more pro-vaccine spaces.
I started talking to doctors on Twitter, on Facebook.
One runs a website called Vaxopedia, which someone jokingly called the Snopes for Vaccination.
And I was like, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And you guys don't like it because he actually proves you wrong with concrete evidence.
Like, you know, because they think those fact checking sites are all bogus too.
And well, you'd have to once you want to continue believing the thing you believe, right?
So yeah, I was looking at Vaxipedia and started digging at these tropes that I had believed for so many years and realizing that those, I was wrong about those as well.
And I came to the conclusion that vaccines were actually way safer than I was led to believe.
Now, I don't think anything is risk-free, but I somehow believe that for my kids, that the risks were much greater to me having autoimmune disease anyway and my daughter's quote-unquote reaction.
Then I started looking into that as well.
And I realized that her reaction was actually a localized pain reaction.
If you've ever had a tetanus shot, it is an extremely painful shot that causes muscle soreness.
My daughter was like maybe seven pounds when she was eight weeks old.
So she was a really tiny child and she got a tetanus shot in her thigh.
Yeah.
Babies will scream when they're in pain.
Like she, she was probably in a lot of pain.
And then when they're tired from screaming, they'll sleep really deep.
And it takes a lot of energy.
It takes a lot of energy to cry.
And, you know, if you're in pain, you're not going to be hungry either.
Like it affects everything.
So it makes sense that my daughter had the reaction she did.
And had maybe that been explained properly to me, I would have felt much better.
So that's where I feel like I was failed by public health when my daughter had that reaction and I was blown off as just being, you know, a dumb first-time mom that just didn't know what was going on.
It broke trust.
Yeah.
Worried about things that happen every day to them, but a better bedside manner might have might have turned that around for you.
Exactly.
And you know your child, right?
Like my daughter was a great baby.
She was happy.
I never, I, I honestly can say that.
Like I never heard her cry like that.
I, I, she, she was never, she was so easy to make happy.
You know, I, I fed her when she was hungry.
I changed her when she was, I never heard her sound so distressed in my life.
And so for me, that was awful to go through.
It wasn't like she was colicky or something that I heard her, you know, suffer like that ever.
And so mothers are connected to their infants and you're not supposed to hear your baby cry.
That is very distressing.
Yeah.
Just biologically distressing.
So you can't downplay that when a parent is worried because they're going to figure out, they want to figure out why that happened and how to make sure that never happens again.
Yeah.
I feel like that's where I was let down, you know, by the healthcare system.
Yeah.
And it's, it's amazing how something so simple can lead to that.
Like it was just one interaction for you, but essentially, well, maybe two.
Yeah.
But they're back to back in a short time.
And I mean, we rely on healthcare people for so much.
And that trust is so important, right?
That's, that's amazing.
Yeah.
I do have a couple of questions, if you don't mind.
Sure.
So do you think that humans are more convinced by emotional and social factors than we are by logic and statistics?
I actually can share a study with you that that is entirely true.
That is a fact.
That is not just like a theory.
That is absolutely true.
And that is why, you know, when it comes to vaccine advocacy, we need to use more than just facts to convince people.
That's why a lot of people, I get criticized because I have a Twitter, a tweet that I've bookmarked and it's of my son.
My three-year-old son caught COVID before he could be vaccinated.
And he's incredibly sick because they like to push this narrative that because mortality is low for children, that COVID is safe for children to get.
And that is completely untrue.
It's not true.
You're right.
And my three-year-old is a healthy three-year-old.
He has no comorbidities and he became so ill with COVID.
He had pneumonia, an ear infection, belly pain, viral conjunctivitis, which is like pink eye.
It affected every part of his body.
And he would wander around looking so lost.
Like it was heartbreaking.
Like he had never felt that sick and like he was scared.
At the age of three, he was, he was scared at what was going on in his body, let alone like, you know, his parents, right?
And I had to take him to the ER and she was listening to his lungs.
And fortunately, his O2 is still good, but he had crackling in his lungs that indicated pneumonia.
And he had to go on antibiotics.
He's never been on antibiotics his entire life before that point.
Like my kids are knock on wood.
I have very healthy children that recover quickly from anything that's ever happened to them.
And so it's scary, like that is scary.
And without modern medicine, I think, you know, his risk of mortality would have been quite higher, right?
Yeah.
So to sit there and say that COVID is harmless for children is wrong.
And that's why I share that.
I have a video clip of me waiting in the hospital to be seen.
And he, you can see suffering.
And I share that because that, that will impact people more than any factoid I can tell people about COVID in children.
Yeah, it's, it's almost like if you are going to go to a casino and you're going to gamble anyway, and something that's going to improve your odds is only a very small amount is something like, wow, whatever.
But when it's like your child's life is on the line and it's going to improve your odds that much, you go, where do I sign?
What do I do?
Like, why aren't we doing that already?
Why did you bother asking me?
I don't understand this question.
Yeah.
It doesn't make any sense.
And compare his siblings because his siblings all had it.
My oldest caught it first.
And I don't know what came over me, but in Canada, you have to wait eight weeks between COVID shots with children.
And my middle child, he has autism and I was concerned with him getting COVID.
because he's got sensory issues that I think would could be affected very badly.
And so I pushed his vaccine, his second vaccine three weeks early.
I called like the Alberta CDC and I was like, listen, he's in all these therapies.
He's got more potential exposure than the average kid.
I would like his second vaccine to occur sooner.
And they said, yeah.
Like, so it was worth asking.
It was a question worth asking because, you know, they allowed it.
And he came down with COVID exactly two weeks after his second shot.
And all he had was like the most minor sniffle.
Like, I wouldn't have even thought it was COVID had his sister not had it.
Right.
And so in comparison of the two, like my freshly vaccinated child and then his little brother, who's only a few years younger, vast difference in the course of the illness.
Both lived, but one did way worse than the other.
And same with my oldest.
My oldest had a bit more issue, but she was almost vaccinated a year before she caught it because I got her vaccinated quite soon for her age group was available way sooner.
And so she had a bit more issue with it.
She had a pretty nasty, severe sore throat for three days and like some nasty fatigue.
But even then, she didn't need antibiotics.
She didn't get pneumonia.
She didn't get all these issues.
So it still was an effective preventative for her because it could be worse.
It could always be worse.
And my three-year-old really showed me that, you know, it is definitely worse in the unvaccinated.
Next question.
Do you think of the anti-vax movement as a political movement?
Not that it's being spearheaded or led by any kind of political leader, but just that it has its own sort of life as a thing where the people in anti-vax would rather be in the consensus.
And their goal is perhaps just to convince everyone else to be with them.
I say to people, they'll take whoever will have them.
So in the beginning, when I was part of it, you know, back in 2008, it was definitely more a left-leaning thing.
It was middle-class college, university educated mothers that were trying to, it was kind of being sold as doing the best, you know, thing you could do.
Right.
I have an interesting article where I write about how demographics also affects this movement and how it was sold to like middle class mothers as, you know, it's almost like a status thing if you can afford all of these things, you know, and then vaccination is for poor people.
Like they have no choice, but I do because I have money and I'm educated and it's interesting.
I'm doing what's best, you know, and the same thing with the political pandering, right?
So you can sell it as that to middle class, you know, educated people, but you can put a different political spin on it.
And now you're selling it to, you know, the alt-right movement and the libertarian movement.
And where, you know, I kind of felt it as a, I had different information or the right information.
And it was more, even though I was wrong, it was more based in science than, you know, Christianity or the different spins that are now appealing to other people in their political spectrum, right?
So, yeah, it's, they'll take whoever will have them.
And that's why you see this overlap with all of these different groups now is because it's not about the right education or the right information because they'll change the information depending on who they're pandering to.
Right.
Yeah.
That's, I've, I've covered that from a different angle before that these, what I call them reality denying groups like Flat Earth, Anti-Vax, creationist.
And I started seeing that creeping in.
And that was another thing that made me pause.
And I even said at one point, I'm like, oh, they're just trying to make us look bad.
So like they're trying to appeal to these other groups.
Like it's like some kind of covert operation to make people who know the truth look stupid.
Right.
You know, like you just try to wrap, rationalize all these different things to hold on to this idea that you just have dug your heels in and want to believe.
So that's, I, that's part of the cognitive dissonance, I think, that occurs when you believe these issues, like when you believe like anti-vax or even conspiracy theories, when someone shows you evidence to the contrary, you find these clever ways to kind of explain it away that I no longer feel I have to do now that I'm believing like evidence-based science and medicine, right?
I don't have to do this rationalization and this mental gymnastics because the data makes sense.
There's these large robust studies that with, you know, some of these COVID vaccine studies have two and a half million people.
Yeah.
You know, where they're, so like, how do, how, how can I deny that unless I just don't adhere to the plane of reality?
Yeah.
So there's no cognitive, when people come at me, I no longer have this psychological discomfort that I felt as an anti-vaxxer when people corrected me.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
So when I try to put my head into the space of a person who has sort of declared their allegiance with one of these reality denying ideologies, I think about, because I've seen some of them in the, in real life, in the wild.
And I wonder if in some cases, you know, you imagine a person who has declared, say, that the earth is flat.
And first of all, they might congratulate themselves for bucking the trend and having enough courage to admit that the earth is flat and that they congratulate themselves at first.
And then perhaps, and I've seen it happen many times, there's some friction or argument or social cost that's incurred based on their new belief that it so strongly conflicts with the consensus belief.
And then that cost can become like part of a sunk cost fallacy that can work to prevent them from moving from that back to the consensus view because they look at the situation and they think that if it turns out that the earth is really flat,
that all those people who broke all those relationships would have to then apologize to them and they could be right versus if they concede the point that the earth is spherical, all they have to look forward to is a bunch of uncomfortable conversations.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Was this anything you experienced at all with yourself or anyone else?
Yeah.
So my mother-in-law, for a decade of her nursing career, was a vaccine nurse.
And I actually, I don't know, if you listen to a few episodes, you probably heard that one where I talked to her.
Yeah.
I thought it was very well done.
Yeah, and I, you know, I had to go to her and apologize and admit I was wrong.
And that was hard.
That's really hard.
It's, it's, it's not easy, but it gets easier, you know.
And that's why I really recommend like leaning into the discomfort.
Like if you feel that cognitive dissonance, you feel that psychological discomfort when someone tells you you're wrong.
And I know, and I know what that is.
It's, it's, you know, you feel it in your chest, maybe in your throat.
It's, it's just, it's just, it's an emotion and it's a feeling and it almost chokes you up.
But it's like anxiety, right?
Yeah.
It wants, it makes you want to disengage, shut it off, block them, you know, never talk to them again, maybe get angry, whatever.
Um, I say lean into that discomfort, and that is your signal to reanalyze, maybe with through a different lens what they're saying to you.
Yeah.
Instead of pushing them away and burying your head or digging your heels in further, because that's how you get it.
That's how people get involved in cults, right?
Like, well, yeah, because they don't want to lean into that discomfort.
They pull away and choose to believe more and more ridiculous things.
And that's, that puts us in danger.
You know, I mean, there are people that have sacrificed their children, basically, cults.
Especially once we're cut off from what would otherwise be our support system.
Yeah.
So that's all I can recommend is just lean into that discomfort and explore it.
And instead of, you know, running back to the people that will tell you you're correct.
I imagine that your mother-in-law doesn't constantly remind you that you were once wrong.
No, no.
And accepts you that you're now on the side of science and everything else.
It would become insufferable if she did constantly say, I told you so.
Yeah.
No, it was just relief.
And even my husband, who's very supportive and understands that I come from a place of trauma, especially, you know, medically, I do have some health issues that I've, you know, it's not the first time the health system has let me down as far as, you know, being involved in that goes.
So he was very understandable.
Even he doesn't rub it in my face.
He's, he's relieved.
He's relieved.
We don't have to explain ourselves anymore.
And he's really like, nobody is rubbing it in my face or like that's important.
It's a non-issue and I survived.
It feels like you might not survive, but you'll survive if you come out of it.
What I see from a lot of people, not just with anti-vax, but with essentially all of the reality denying subsections of the population is that the view from the consensus view, the scientific view is to just cut the ties with them.
And I argue the exact opposite because the way I see it is that the people who are there, once you cut ties with them, there's fewer ways back.
Yeah.
What I think people need who have their heads in those spaces is the idea that they'll be accepted if they leave that information space, that they won't have to, you know, it won't be some kind of albatross they have to wear for the rest of their lives.
They're like, oh, that was the guy that believed the Earth.
Can you believe that?
I'd look at Jim over there, you know.
And in our conversations about this, we need to start talking about it in a way that makes it okay to have been once and that it's okay to no longer be and that it's the stigma of that is not a stigma and that there's stepping stones essentially.
People say, oh, they have to find their own way.
I don't care what I'm working on, but we have to build stepping stones to them.
And I think that's, that's where we have to be.
We have to stop mocking them like they're some kind of.
And that's where people like, and I'm not trying to sound egotistical because there's other people like me out there.
It's not just me that's like, come get out of there.
But that's where people like me are essential, right?
Because I used to think like that.
And that's why I try, because I know it may not sink in then.
Every moment of cognitive dissonance, a seed of doubt is planted and it's there.
And they try the reaction to that is to try to bury it and forget about it.
But it's there and it's slowly taking a sprout, I guess, or away or whatever it's doing.
And so you have to like, you know, whenever they bring up misinformation, tell them the correct information, even though they get kind of, I mean, I've had death threats and I've had not very kind interactions from that side because I'm viewed as a betrayer, you know, but you're an apostate.
Yeah, I'm an apostate.
I give them that feeling and they hate that, you know, and I understand that that's why I get that.
But you have to still try.
And I try, I try and I, and maybe sometimes I come off as a bit condescending or mean, you know, I can't be, especially if I show them that.
But I also feel like I have a place to say that because I was like that.
I have a place.
It's, it's like when you have any kind of silly behavior you used to do.
And now you're looking at it and going, like, I thought that too.
And I like the one guy I was talking to yesterday on Twitter, I said, you know what?
I really hope that one day you look back at what you said to me today and you cringe as hard as I do when I think of the things that I said.
Right.
That's what my hope is for you.
I know that day isn't today, but you know, that's what I'm hoping.
I mean, from my perspective, you have an experience that I just don't have.
And I can't pretend to have it.
I can create a space in my head where I try to mimic it, but it's really just not the same.
And I'm always looking for more ways to view it from a different angle to try to see if I can see inside that viewpoint to see if I can create a perhaps a better argument or a better view to look at it.
If I can not just realize too, is that these movements are predatory.
So just like, you know, like I didn't just fall into that, like I'm educated and, you know, I fell into this movement because what they do is find you at your weakest, just like all cults, right?
Like people who join cults tend to be in not the greatest, they're in a vulnerable state.
And they're looking for support and looking for support.
And so, and that's what happened to me, you know, with my daughter and how I was going through that.
And it is, it's a people that believe this stuff, they're, you know, there's this idea that they're somehow stupid and they're, they're not stupid.
Like, I don't think they're stupid at all.
I think that somebody, they were going through like a fearful time or a vulnerable time and somebody took advantage of that.
And it's these grifting with the anti-vax movement, it's these grifting doctors, you know, that have substacks that make, you know, Dr. Camill in the UK makes 4 million on his YouTube channel.
He was, he was pretty evidence-based at the beginning of the pandemic.
And then he came out and said Ivermectin worked and he would not back down.
And that gained him so many viewers that he made $4 million off his YouTube channel.
What incentive does he have to tell the truth?
Wow.
When he dug his heels in and profited lying to people.
And that's what these doctors do and these, you know, contrarian experts.
There's money and they want to say follow the money all they want.
Yeah, they'll definitely say that for big pharma, it's all about money.
Yeah.
But these guys are making like Malone makes $40,000, I think, on his substack every month.
So what is a Substack?
It is a newsletter that people pay to read.
And the subscription is like $5 a month or whatever.
So it's, it's almost like a Patreon for a newsletter.
Yeah.
And at least Patreon has some kind of terms of service where, you know, if you're, you know, trying to collect money, let's say for, you know, nefarious purposes, such as like, you know, your White House group or terrorism, then they'll say no, but Substack doesn't have that.
Right.
Anyone can say anything on Substack.
They do not police.
And I would not make money on Substack.
You know, that's, that's the thing.
Like I like, let's say I wanted to have a Substack newsletter.
Nobody would subscribe to that because I'm telling the status quo.
I'm telling the consensus and what is it?
And you're getting the same info that you could get for free from.
Yeah, I'm not telling a secret, right?
Like, so that's not going to make me anything.
It's these contrarian doctors that have told people that being contrarian means you're a critical thinker.
It makes them feel special.
But they're not critically thinking.
They're just contrarian.
They've confused the two.
And so like other cults, it tricks them into thinking they have special knowledge that other people don't have and a sense of superiority, a sense of purpose.
They're going to save the world from the bad vaccine.
You know, like it's tricky.
And it doesn't mean you're dumb if you fell for it.
It just that's important.
It plays on many facets of human psychology that make people fall for this stuff.
You know.
Yeah, that's a thing that I've said before on my podcast, but I don't know if I say it enough.
The things that will confuse you, like no one comes to the wrong conclusion when they were not trying to come to a conclusion.
And no one works on a conclusion if they didn't have intelligence to work with in the first place.
So you're far more likely to come to the wrong conclusion when you're intelligent.
It seems completely backward.
Yeah.
But it's absolutely true.
You're far more likely to be naive and brought down the wrong path if you're intelligent and you're thinking about stuff than you are if you're literally not thinking about anything.
Yeah.
And that's a thing we have to remember.
And that's a thing we have to try to get across to people is that these people who are in here, they're people.
They're not demons.
They're not even bad.
They're just misled.
They're using the wrong information.
They're not applying the appropriate logic to sift the data they're getting, to parse it properly, to think about what would have to happen.
And that's where they are.
They're not terrible people.
They're just people.
And they're being emboldened by these people who do know better that are able to convince them.
You know, like it's like they're imparting Dunning Krueger.
giving them just enough information to make it make sense so that they feel like they understand what is going on.
You know, it just, there's so many things at play, like ego, for instance, and, you know, people want to look for patterns.
And there's so many things that are unique to human psychology that make us prone to cult ideology and misinformation.
Right.
The way I explain it to people is that we all have a computer at our disposal inside our heads, and that computer comes preloaded with software.
And through our lives, through our experiences, we add new bits of software that we made ourselves, but it's still based on or in some way uses that warehouse software that was there in the first place.
And some of that is not that useful for coming to the right conclusion.
And so that's why, like, I don't know if you listened to the very first episode, I laid out some kind of rules that we try to follow.
One of the main rules is that the things that occur in nature are not necessarily good for us.
Because by our natural level, we wouldn't be doing any of the things we'd be doing.
We wouldn't have vaccines.
We wouldn't be even eating healthy foods.
We would be getting scurvy and dying at 24.
And blaming it on things that didn't cause it.
Yeah, blaming it on the sun's too bright or.
Yeah.
I didn't sacrifice.
I didn't sacrifice enough chickens.
Yeah, whatever the current superstition is.
And what we need to do is we need to stop believing that we're right and good just by existing.
And we have to stop believing that everything will turn out because it always turned out well before.
That's no guarantee that it's going to turn out well in the future.
And we need to take charge of our world in the way that only humans can and make plans for how we're going to do this.
Yeah.
That's where we really are.
And if you don't know how to do that, then maybe just start listening to other people who feel that they are and judge for yourself whether they're on the right path.
And if they aren't, try another one or learn more because we all have the ability to learn more.
And so few of us actually do it.
And if you are going to dabble in science, you know, in science, evidence-based, you know, reasoning, then you have to understand what the hierarchy of evidence is.
And there is a hierarchy.
And that's where I kind of was led down the wrong path was that I was putting way too much weight in these small studies that should have led to bigger studies and did lead to bigger studies that actually ended up disproving what the smaller study showed.
Right.
And you can't do that.
Like that's, that's not how science works.
So if you're going to, you know, start venturing out into trying to form your own scientific opinions, you, you have to really research and understand what the hierarchy of evidence is.
And I'm still working on that.
I still don't quite have a grasp on determining what's more important or more weighty than others, but I do my best.
And that's a good place to start before you start reading studies and saying vaccines are bad or climate change is fake or whatever it is people are saying now.
I really recommend that the first place you should start is the hierarchy of evidence and learning what that is before you start judging when you read some pop science or junk science headline in the media, understand what the hierarchy of evidence actually is.
Well, having listened to 10 episodes of your podcast, I must say that, you know, you are already very well informed compared to certainly where I am on the on the topic.
You certainly don't hold back on reading up and learning everything.
And I mean, I didn't know how much you knew before, but I consider myself to be attempting to learn all these things as well.
And I'm just left behind.
And that's why I try to ask experts, right?
Because that's one thing I'll tell people is like, I'm not an expert.
Yeah.
But I talk to experts and I ask experts when I hear something.
I'll find like the whole blood-brain barrier.
That was another trope or that was the trope I originally realized was wrong.
And so I asked Abraham, Dr. Abraham Ahmad, who is the world's top researcher on the blood-brain barrier and how to cross it.
I asked him.
Yeah.
I listened.
Yeah, it was great.
Yeah.
People say that, you know, vaccines can cross the blood-brain barrier.
Can you explain how that's impossible?
And he explained it.
And I was like, oh, you know, it doesn't make me an expert on the blood-brain barrier.
Even though, but I believe him.
Yeah.
Well, he obviously knew what he was talking about.
And that's a thing that I think is interesting is that all of these reality denying groups eventually lead to global conspiracy for one particular reason.
It's because in order to hold that belief and construct an entire world around it, you have to believe that most of the world is willfully lying to you.
And that's a headspace that I don't know how it continues for an entire lifetime.
It's a double think that it's, yeah.
One thing that made me cautious of any conspiracy hypothesis or theory or whatever is the things that were said about me.
Oh, yeah.
I've had some pretty elaborate conspiracies made up about me.
Yeah.
And I have no idea where they came up with it.
That must be a strange experience.
It is.
And now when I hear like, when I hear about any even particularly famous person or whatever, like, cause you kind of like, you know, jokingly entertain some of the things that are said.
I'm like, these things are just made up and people just spread them without actually knowing.
Like one guy said I worked for the WEF and the UN and like, I'm actually a Russian doctor named Lydia Rodova.
And I worked for the CDC as a spy.
I'm like, all this crazy stuff.
I was like, what?
And then another person claimed to have worked with me.
And they were like in a different country than me.
I'm like, I'm, I know, I, I know I'm Canadian and I know I grew up in Alberta.
There's like no way that I ever worked with this person.
But they're going around telling people that we work together and I'm like this paid shill and like, what?
Right.
I will not entertain anything like that ever again.
That must be interesting.
I've, I've never, I've never had that, anything even close to that experience, but that that must be kind of surreal, right?
To see that people are weaving you into their fan fiction, essentially.
And they have to to protect their to justify their belief.
Yeah, they have to.
That they got that cognitive dissonance.
And instead of saying, wow, she changed your mind, maybe I should consider the same.
They have to weave me into this conspiracy.
And then it also warns the other people that, you know, the other cult members, because that's what cults do is they try to prevent other members from leaving.
And so by telling their cult members, like, this is who she really is, it prevents them from hearing what I have to say.
The pro-vaxxers walk among us.
Yeah.
You know, and that's a cult thing.
Like she was never really one of us.
Yeah, right.
Anybody that leaves a unbeliever, you know, cultish religion or cultish, you know, groupthink, anytime you leave, you know, and I've seen this in many different online cults, you know, extreme veganism, anti-vax, homeopathy, any like yoga, you know, like if you listen, spirituality is a really great podcast because there are a lot of these wellness groups turning into actual real cults.
And yeah, as soon as you leave and have something negative to say about your experience, they tell all their members, you know, she, she was never really one of us.
Don't listen to her.
You're a true believer.
They pat them on the head.
You know, she was not a believer, but you are.
Good for you, you know, and it keeps people involved and they remain because one, they don't want to be outcast.
Like, look at how negative they're talking about me.
Two, you know, I'm a real believer.
Yay, me, you know.
I feel like that's a manipulation of social expectation.
Like it's when they have those conversations, you know, when someone leaves and then they begin the disinformation campaign against them, they're essentially ramping up the social value of belief itself that all the people who stayed are good and pure and have all the good social qualities because of their continued belief in whatever it is, our mission.
Impurity is a big idea in cult ideology because, and I saw that and people say, oh, was anti-vax really cult-like?
And I'm like, yes, it has so many similarities to cult, including people.
These parents will disparage their vaccine, vaccinated children as damaged.
Okay.
And then when they, when they go on to have other children, what they'll do is they'll put the unvaccinated children on a pedestal to sell the idea that not vaccinating your children is the right thing to do.
So they'll complain about their vaccinated children's issues and they'll overlook.
And I did this myself.
That's how I know.
They'll overlook the issues that their unvaccinated kids have because how could they possibly have anything wrong with them?
They're pure.
Right.
Right.
And so you'll see the like, and I'm embellishing a little bit like, you know, Tammy didn't learn to read until she was six because she was vaccine damaged.
But little Timmy, he's six months old and he's reading.
Yeah.
Like, and it is pretty much like that.
I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but, you know, that's, and that's how they kind of spin it.
Right.
All the, all the good aspects are because of the purity and all the bad aspects are because of the vaccination.
And that's one thing I will say.
I'm like, I feel when I interact with these parents, I feel sorry for your kid because your kid knows that you look at him as damaged.
Yeah, that's, and that is sad.
It's really sad.
I'm like, you may not realize you're doing that and your kid can't speak up for themselves, but I will speak up for your child.
Yeah, eventually they'll have words.
They'll know.
They'll know that that's how you view them after a while.
And even with my son, who is autistic, you know, I overlooked that because in the anti-vax world, autism is seen as this horrible thing that will ruin your life, ruin your marriage.
You know, your whole life sucks because you had this child who was poisoned by vaccination and it's now this burden that you have to deal with for the rest of your life.
Like that's how ableist and how horrible it is.
And so when my own child started showing signs of autism, I didn't even connect the dots because how could he be autistic?
He's not vaccinated.
It's like you didn't want to believe it.
I did not want to believe it.
I did not want to see it.
I had blinders on to my own child being autistic.
Boys are behind, you know, boys, they tend to, you know, talk later or I just, I rationalized it with all sorts of things, or he's just really unique.
His best friend is the vacuum.
That's, he's just super unique, but he can't actually connect with peers his own age, you know, like I just overlooked everything because he was pure and he should be 100% perfect.
Right.
It gives you there, it sells you on this idea that if you do everything perfectly according to them, you're nothing will be wrong with your children.
And so I couldn't connect those dots because of the cult life like belief I had that, well, I, you know, he's not vaccinated.
He was breastfed for two years.
I ate organic and all this stuff.
So how could he be autistic?
Yeah.
And that's the effort to take control of your environment also puts in the mind of a person the idea that every outcome is because of the thing they did.
Yeah.
And therefore it can't happen to me.
It's an illusion of control, right?
That all the good things are there because I did all the right things in life and all the bad things are there because I screwed up everything in life.
But that's part of like an illusion of control of our world that some things are happening outside of our control and aren't related to the things that we're individually doing.
And I'm sure a long time ago, that served us really well.
A kid ate, you know, somebody died after eating the wrong berry.
If I just don't eat that berry, then I'm not going to die.
We'll avoid those fruits.
Right.
You know, I'm sure at one point that served us really well.
That also led to all the superstitions, right?
You know, Jimmy's kid died on the 13th day of the month.
So we're not going to do anything on the 13th day of the month ever again because, you know, 13 is a bad number.
And it's just as easy to come up with things that are unrelated as it is to come up with things that are related.
And like, even with my son, right?
And this is what happens with the whole autism thing is that if it correlates, then it must be the cause.
And so, you know, autism tends to show up around the time kids are getting vaccinations.
My son, even he, he had a regression, you know, around the age of two and a half, three.
And had I vaccinated him around then, maybe I would have questioned it.
Maybe I would have actually seen the autism because I believe that that's what causes autism and I wouldn't have lost over it.
But, you know, it's easy to believe that, but the studies out there, you cannot deny.
And they're sibling studies, you know, where parents got scared of vaccinating their kids after their first child was autistic.
And then their second child wasn't vaccinated.
And there are completely unvaccinated children in this group.
Some were just skipped.
Some just skip MMR, but some skipped all.
And both, the data from both is in that study.
And autism occurred at the same rate in the siblings that were not vaccinated.
So like vaccines don't cause autism.
And that study had 600,000 children.
Yeah.
So, and I think 4,000 of them were completely unvaccinated.
Yeah.
Most people don't even understand statistics, but they will want to rely on them.
What I pointed out is that people won't look first at the data and then come up with the view.
That's not how almost everyone does it.
Almost everyone comes up with a view they want and then looks for a statistic that supports it.
Supports it.
And if they can't find it, they'll look for something other than statistics and declare that the statistics are crap because they were sure they were right in the first place.
Yeah.
And then completely overlook, for instance, a study with 600,000 children.
Well, sure.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Anyone can just claim that they have that.
And if it was a driving thing, like my youngest is, you know, full, a full, my, all my kids are full siblings.
And had he been, had it been a trigger, let's say, you know, he got vaccinated at the age of two with so many vaccines.
And he is genetically related to his autistic brother.
Yeah.
But no such regression occurred after any of his vaccines.
Like I caught my kids up in a year with the vaccines that they've missed.
Right.
And I'm saying that that's just my anecdote.
And I'll share an anecdote if the evidence supports my anecdote.
I could, I can say like, yeah, it's, I'm not an outlier here.
Like, this is what happens.
This is, you either are born autistic or you're not.
Right.
As far as we can tell about everything about it, it doesn't seem to be related to environment or anything other than genetics.
Yeah.
And we don't even know exactly how the genetics are making it.
It's not like we can find the gene.
Yeah.
There isn't a, I think there's over 230 genes that they're investigating related to autism and some overlap with other conditions like schizophrenia.
My dad is schizophrenic.
So I think, you know, genetically, that's maybe most likely where my son got his genes for autism.
If it turns out they're truly related in the way we think.
Yeah, but it does tend to run in families.
You know, if you have one child with autism, you're more likely to have another child with autism.
But, you know, and that whole, the whole point of that one study was to show that, you know, vaccination isn't what triggered it.
You know, statistically in these sibling groups, whether or not you vaccinated did not increase or decrease the risk.
Right.
So I think we should probably try to wrap up here.
Sure.
Yeah.
I could talk another hour, though.
Well, I might ask you to come on again.
I do have a list of other questions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Your podcast is called Back to the Vax.
Yep.
And I've listened to 10 episodes and they're all good so far.
If you like rough around the edges and unpolished, I'm your girl.
I'm well, I mean, I've seen in the 10 episodes that there have been so far, there has, you know, it has gotten better.
Like I could tell, even when I go back and listen to mine, I can tell I was getting better when I was first starting.
Yeah.
And we're not pros, but we're trying.
And the information that you're and the stories that you're telling and the information you're you're putting out there is really incredible.
And I recommend anyone who's interested in it, who wants more information about vaccines, is confused about anything to go there and listen to those.
They're roughly half an hour each generally, unlike what this episode will be.
And absolutely go there and check out what Lydia and Heather are doing there.
Yeah, we also have a support group on Facebook for any parent out there that is considering vaccinating after being hesitant or anti-vax.
We all support each other, especially for that first appointment.
We help each other get through it because even myself, I had a lot of anxiety that first appointment compared to today.
I just vaccinated my middle child with his COVID booster and I had no anxiety whatsoever.
So it does get better with time and we help each other through it.
And if anyone out there wants to join, you can find the group on Facebook.