➡ In this podcast, independent researcher Forrest Moretti discusses his belief that many modern diseases are man-made, a conclusion he reached after personal medical experiences and extensive research, with Jim Fetzer. He suggests that rapid technological changes are causing harm to human health, as we struggle to adapt to these changes. Moretti also questions the common understanding of polio, suggesting that the disease’s origins and impacts are more complex than widely believed. However, he emphasizes that his theories are hypotheses and may not be entirely accurate.

➡ This text discusses how our understanding of diseases, like polio and the Spanish flu, shapes our response to new outbreaks like SARS, MERS, and Zika. It suggests that our knowledge of these diseases, largely based on historical events, might not be entirely accurate, which could impact how we handle future pandemics. The text also explores the evolution of the term “polio,” originally used to describe a symptom, not a virus. Lastly, it mentions the importance of considering the historical context when discussing diseases, as definitions and understandings can change over time.

➡ The text discusses the complexity of polio, a disease that was once thought to be caused solely by a virus. It suggests that the disease was actually the result of a combination of factors, including exposure to pesticides and the presence of multiple viruses. The text also criticizes the belief that the polio vaccine was the sole solution, arguing that the reduction of pesticide use played a significant role in decreasing the disease. Lastly, it explores the idea of “man-made diseases” and the potential role of environmental factors in causing health issues.

➡ The speaker initially believed vaccines were the most important medical discovery, but after extensive research, they now believe vaccines are unnecessary and potentially harmful. They argue that some diseases, like measles, were not as deadly as portrayed and that vaccines were created because they could be, not because they were needed. They also question the concept of herd immunity, suggesting it’s false for several vaccines, including the COVID vaccine. They conclude by expressing their wish that vaccines were safer and more effective, and didn’t rely on adjuvants (substances that enhance the body’s immune response to an antigen).

➡ The text is a conversation about vaccines, where the speaker shares their journey from believing vaccines were the greatest medical discovery to becoming an anti-vaxxer. They question the necessity of certain vaccines, the concept of herd immunity, and the safety of vaccines, especially in relation to adjuvants (substances that enhance the body’s immune response). They also express concern about the business model of vaccine production and its potential harm. The speaker concludes by wishing vaccines were safer and more effective, and didn’t rely on adjuvants.

➡ This text discusses the idea that our bodies, when properly nourished and stress-free, can handle infections and even thrive through them. It suggests that avoiding infections entirely may not be beneficial for our health. The text also questions the use of hypodermic needles for vaccinations, arguing that they may cause more harm than good by breaching the skin in unnatural ways. Lastly, it discusses the potential dangers of seemingly harmless things like sunglasses, suggesting they might interfere with our body’s natural responses to sunlight.

➡ Inuits used bone glasses to protect their eyes from the snow’s reflection, suggesting that they adapted technology to their environment. The discussion also mentions a book called “The Moth and the Iron Lung,” which is a well-researched example of how complex systems can affect our thinking. The book is available as an audiobook, making it easy to enjoy while on the go.

➡ The text talks about how Inuits used bone glasses to protect their eyes from the snow’s reflection, suggesting that this was a helpful tool despite their ancestors not living on ice. It also discusses the possibility of eye shape adaptations for living in snowy conditions. The conversation ends with a recommendation for a well-researched book called “The Moth and the Iron Lung,” which is also available as an audiobook.

➡ This text discusses the complexity of diseases and how they’re often caused by multiple factors, not just one. It uses polio as an example, explaining that while the polio virus is involved, there are other factors at play too. The text also talks about how our understanding of diseases has evolved over time, and how sometimes, our assumptions about a disease’s cause can be oversimplified or even wrong. It emphasizes the importance of considering all possible causes and not just focusing on one.➡ This text discusses the complexity of diseases and how they’re often caused by multiple factors, not just one. It uses polio as an example, explaining that while the polio virus is involved, there are other elements at play too. The text also talks about the limitations of scientific understanding in the past, and how this has sometimes led to oversimplification of disease causes. Lastly, it suggests that environmental factors could also play a role in disease outbreaks.

➡ The author discusses his research on a significant event that is not widely known. He discovered that during a certain period in New England, an invasive species of moth called the gypsy moth caused massive destruction to the region’s plants and animals. This moth was brought to the U.S. by a Frenchman who was trying to breed a more resilient silk-producing caterpillar, but the moth ended up causing ecological damage. The author also expresses concern about the potential long-term negative effects of antibiotics and vaccines, suggesting that their misuse could lead to serious problems in the future.

➡ This text talks about how lab mice, used for drug testing, have evolved in captivity to have longer telomeres (parts of our DNA that affect cell aging). This change makes them more resistant to damage but also more likely to get cancer. The author suggests that this could make harmful drugs appear safe in tests. He also discusses how financial interests can influence scientific research, leading to misleading results. He ends by discussing the potential costs and benefits of antibiotics and surgery, arguing that while they can be beneficial, they can also be misused or overused.

➡ The text discusses the potential harm and benefits of vaccines and antibiotics, emphasizing the importance of humble curiosity in science. It then delves into the history of the gypsy moth invasion in the northeastern United States, which led to the use of toxic pesticides, including Paris green and lead arsenate. The author suggests a possible link between the use of these pesticides and the outbreak of polio. The text also touches on the dangerous medical practices of the past, such as giving mercury to infants, and compares it to modern-day practices like the use of Tylenol.

➡ This text discusses the complexity of diseases and vaccines, using examples like smallpox and polio. It questions the traditional understanding of these diseases and their vaccines, suggesting that there might be more to the story than what is commonly believed. The author also mentions how diseases and vaccines are often oversimplified or romanticized, which can lead to misunderstandings. Lastly, the text emphasizes the need for more research and understanding in the field of medicine.

➡ Polio is a disease that starts with paralysis in the legs and can move up, potentially causing death by paralyzing the muscles needed for breathing. The virus that causes polio is thought to enter the body through the intestines, which are close to the bottom of the spinal cord in children. Some believe that pesticides could damage the gut and allow the virus to enter the nervous system. This theory suggests that changes in human behavior, such as pesticide use, could increase the chances of the virus reaching the nervous system.

➡ This text talks about how pesticides sprayed on fruits can harm our bodies, especially in children. These pesticides can damage the gut, allowing viruses to move from the gut to the spine, causing inflammation and diseases like polio. The text also discusses how the first polio vaccine didn’t work because it didn’t fight the virus in the gut, but later vaccines did. However, these vaccines only protect against one type of virus and can sometimes cause the virus to become more harmful.

Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast. I am thrilled and honored to be sitting this morning with Forrest Moretti, who is an independent researcher whose books I have been grappling with. My suggestion to you at home is that you find a chair and sit in it so you don’t fall over when you hear some of what Forrest has to tell us. Forrest, welcome to Dark Horse. Hey, Brett, thanks for having me.

It’s an honor to sit in this chair across the screen from you. I’m looking forward to an interesting conversation. Yes, I have zero doubt it’s going to be an interesting conversation. Let’s start with some basics. You are an independent researcher who has, through some mechanism that you will tell me, become deeply involved in questions surrounding iatrogenic harm, that is, harm done by doctors and medicine, and then the larger question of industrial society and its impact on human health.

Is that a fair summary of your interest? Yeah, I, through some medical journeys and frustrations with my family and some things they’ve gone through, like a lot of people, finally got to the point where I felt like not only did the doctors not have answers, in some cases their recommendations were at best misguided and at worst harmful. And through that frustration, as is the case with any sort of loving human being, you start doing research, you start looking for answers.

And me and my wife both got very curious and started doing some reading and were, I suppose, progressively horrified by what we started to find as we went down the proverbial rabbit hole. And, yeah, it ended up at the point where I became convinced that a lot of disease, as we now describe it, was in fact, man made. And this is not new to probably many of your listeners, but at the time, seven, eight years ago, when I first started reading this, I was absolutely flummoxed by how much of modern disease appeared to have man made origins.

So that was essentially the beginning, was frustration in our own journey. And like a lot of people, it led to a lot of answers and a lot more questions. But here I am, still writing books, still trying to find the answers to things. But I think we’ve got a few, so maybe we can talk about those at some point. Yeah, so let’s just sort of set the stage for the conversation here.

My viewers know I’m not a journalist, and this is not an interview. It’s a discussion. I don’t know how much you know about my background, Forrest, but my wife and I, Heather, have written a book. The title of the book is a hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century. But there’s a part of me that wishes that it had been named hypernovelty. And the idea of hypernovelty is that humans, though we are the most rapidly evolving species that has ever existed on this planet, are unable to keep pace with the rate of technological change.

And so we are constantly, effectively a fish out of water. This hypernovel environment, in which we don’t even get to be adults in the same world that we were children in, is making us sick, physically, psychologically, socially. So I was shocked and fascinated when I read the first book of yours that I encountered to discover that what I thought I understood of polio was just simply wrong. And further, what I loved about your book the Moth and the iron lung about poliomyelitis is that you did not find yourself defaulting into a simplified alternative story.

The full complexity of polio is represented there, so that the parts of polio that we all think we understand stand are better explained by the model that you put forward. And then your model also explains a good many things that are not present in what most of us have come to believe about it. So this is fabulous from my perspective in multiple regards. One, you’re a true dark horse.

You’re not a professional biologist. You’re somebody who has been driven to research the these questions for some reasons that are personal and some clearly deep intellectual fascination with important topics. And it has led you to models that obviously have a high degree of predictive power. I’ve got more to say, but I’d love to hear your reaction to that so far. Yeah, well, let me just preface anything I say over the next hour, two or three, in that the things I propose in these books, I don’t know if they’re true.

I can’t be certain of them. I wish I could. So rather, I mentioned this in the crooked book at the beginning, rather than put a giant footnote at the end of every sentence I say. I want your listeners to understand. I think what I say to be true. I do. I’m fairly convinced of it. But I don’t know until we have the technology or the faculties of human reason that go beyond what’s currently possible, we don’t know for sure.

So I’ll just preface it with, this is my understanding of the way things work. I think what I’m saying is true. And sort of ironically, I hope what I’m saying is not true, because unfortunately, if what I’m proposing is true, then it’s horrible. And it’s a very dark reality that humans are going to have to come to terms with at some point. So regarding the moth. Go ahead.

Oh, go ahead. No, well, I just wanted to say. I wanted to just say a couple things with regard to that. For one thing, dark horse viewers and listeners are well familiar with the distinction between hypothesis and theory, which I was happy to see you actually covered in your book. If I had. I’ve got the most minor critiques of your book. I thought it was excellent. I’m talking now about the moth and the iron lung, which is the only one that I have finished.

I’m still involved in reading. Give it to me. Well, no, I was just going to suggest that you allude to the distinction of hypothesis from theory. And I just, you know, I wished you had leaned on it more heavily, because what I say is that it actually is very important that we monitor that distinction and know exactly where we are relative to it when we speak, because it tells you the rules of engagement and you don’t need to footnote anything once you’ve said, here is a hypothesis, and then you can say, this is why I believe it to be true.

It has predictive power over these three things which aren’t predicted by any other hypothesis sort of thing. So the fact that the ancients delivered us a tool that tells us exactly at what level to absorb a particular concept, it’s a pity we’ve forgotten the distinction. But I was glad you used it, to some extent. I appreciate that. Yeah. So with moth and the iron lung and polio. Polio is sort of, as I’ve described it, the foundational myth or tale, depending on whether you believe it or not, that undergirds nearly all of modern scientific recognition, all of modern scientific laud and honor that’s bestowed upon it.

And there were often rumors of things about polio that sounded odd to me, that sounded strange. There were rumors that the pesticide DDT had something to do with polio. And it wasn’t a real fascination of mine until I started looking into the story and was confused because polio was essentially first diagnosed or recognized in the United States in 1894 in a town called Rutland, Vermont. And you can go on any web search and ask for when is the first epidemic of polio? And they’ll tell you it’s 1894.

So a tiny bit of research with a tiny bit of an open mind will quickly lead you to the fact that that outbreak of polio included animals. So anyone who’s done cursory research on polio will quickly relate to you that, wait a minute, polio doesn’t strike animals. In fact, there’s only one type of animal on the planet you can do meaningful polio research on. And it’s a. It’s a monkey.

And so that was. Hold on. It’s an old world monkey. And that’s important because it does suggest this would be a classic virus that was limited phylogenetically as a human virus that can only infect something closely related to us, like an old world monkey. The fact that new world monkeys are too distant, that would fit with a classic model. Go ahead. Yeah, that’s right. The fact that the earliest outbreak of polio included so many different types of animals among its victims made me question immediately.

I’m sure, Brett, you’ve developed a little 6th sense, a little spidey sense that goes off immediately and says, now wait a minute, something doesn’t add up here. The first epidemic of polio in the United States and animals are being stricken. Something is going on. So that was an immediate red flag to me. Something that sense that something is wrong. In fact, it fits with what I believe Isaac Asimov said, that the most important phrase in science is not, aha, that’s funny.

That’s awesome. I’ve never heard that. Yeah, it’s an important one. I would also just point out to you, just since I know where you’re headed, having read the moth in the iron lung, a tremendous amount of what the public understands about its own viral jeopardy comes from a small number of stories. One of them is polio. One of them is the spanish flu. And then there’s the question of SARS, mers and Zika, these sort of recent outbreaks.

We reverse engineer a great deal from the idea that we understand the cause of poliomyelitis was discovered. And the truly terrifying epidemic was finally brought under control by the polio vaccine, the salk vaccine. And that polio is now tantalizingly close to having been driven from the earth because of our diligence with that mechanism. Likewise, the spanish flu tells us just how dangerous an epidemic can be and therefore how serious our behavior relative to something that is beginning to spread might be.

And SARS and MeRs tell us something about how likely a virus is to jump from a zoonotic source to people leading tedros the UN head to tell us it’s not a matter of if, but when the next terrifying pandemic is going to leap to humans. And I think it’s perfectly fair if you use deductive logic and you take those cases to be your, your assumptions that these cases are what we’ve come to understand them to be, then you can extrapolate a lot about how likely a deadly pandemic is to spread, what the best tactics are likely to be for preventing harm to humans, etcetera.

But if those stories aren’t what we think they are, everything about that picture changes. And so this is why, in a moment where polio might arguably be close to elimination, we should be very focused on that story, because it’s not just about the danger of getting polio, it’s about what the actual implications of the polio story might be. And I don’t think they are what I was taught in school.

Yeah. Whether my hypothesis is true or not, we can all, I think, safely agree that the story we were taught is at least wrong, again, if not worse, horribly, horribly misguided, and in such a way that it’s caused the suffering of probably millions more than it otherwise would have had us humans been able to have had some candor, some humility and transparency along the way. I mentioned in a conversation we had that I approach these things historically more than scientifically.

And one of the reasons a historical overview of things like this is useful in such a way that perhaps COVID can’t be yet, because we don’t sort of have the history of COVID The lore around medicine, particularly vaccines, had not reached a fever pitch. Even in the fifties and sixties, when the polio vaccines started to come out. And then other ones were added, such as measles and mumps, it hadn’t reached the savior complex level of lore within science.

And so when you read about it, you feel that you’re getting an honest look into what was actually going on. So, if I may, polio, just so your listeners sort of understand the story, polio follows the life cycle of a lot of disease. In that, and when I say life cycle, I don’t mean microbial life cycle, I mean epidemiological life cycle. In that a pattern is noticed, there’s suffering.

Let’s say a pattern is noticed and the description of said disease begins to form, other patterns may begin, and perhaps the disease explanation gets a little wider. Now, as scientific research begins to form, descriptions of the disease actually get narrower and the focus on things gets narrower so that the nomenclature grows like a tree and it starts to get more specific. So when you do historical research on any sort of scientific inquiry, you need to keep in mind that as you go back further in time, you’re likely to come across more generic descriptions of things.

Because when we say polio today, when you or I mention that word, we instinctively think of paralysis caused by the polio virus. Our first sponsor for this episode is Helix. Helix makes truly fantastic mattresses. Have you ever been traveling and climbed into bed only to discover that the mattress wasn’t comfortable? If you’ve traveled at all, it’s almost certainly happened to you. Conversely, have you ever experienced the feeling of relief when you discover a great mattress, one that lets you sleep comfortably through the night? Helix is that mattress.

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That’s an additional 15% off@fastgrowingtrees. com. Using the code darkhorse at checkout fastgrowingtrees. com code Darkhorse offer is valid for a limited, valid for a limited time. Of course, terms and conditions may apply, as they always do. And if you trace the history of that word all the way back to the beginning, there’s all the way down the tree. At the very beginning, poliomyelitis was a symptom. It was purely describing inflammation of the gray matter of the spinal cord.

And you literally would see people use it as, like I mentioned in the book, you have a headache, or they might say you have apoleomyelitis, which is you have a lesion in your spinal cord, and that’s why you were experiencing paralysis. So it’s important to understand as we speak about polio. Keep in mind the clock on the side of the screen, the year, because as you go back in time, it didn’t mean what you and I think of it as.

So the reality of polio is it’s really a description of paralysis, neuronal or paralysis of the neurons that cause weakness in your muscles. And we don’t know why you and I think of it as, oh, the polio virus caused it. The reality, as we’ll see if we continue this discussion far enough, is there were many, many different things that could cause this, most of which can be attributed to a man made change that happened it’s easy to document.

So this is a classic example. And in fact, all of your work that I’ve encountered so far falls under the heading of what we say, welcome to complex systems. And we have discussed extensively on dark horse. The fact that those who would apply the rules of complicated systems to complex systems create hazard after hazard, that complex systems have a distinct toolkit for engaging them. And what you’re saying is a perfect example.

We have something phenomenological. You’ve got inflammation of the gray matter of the spine that is associated with paralysis. That’s an observation. It would be strange if only one thing caused that. Inflammation is a very general condition, and the fact that the inflammation can lead to paralysis suggests there ought to be at least a short list of things that could cause this. The idea that poliomyelitis is the observation of that inflammation, which I understand from you, can only be positively idd after death, that you need to actually look at the spine, a cross section, is that right? Well, yeah, it’s the only way you could.

Origin of what the inflammation is coming from. Right. But the idea that, okay, you would expect a number of things to be able to cause what was once upon a time called poliomyelitis, but that a historical process has caused scientists and doctors to hone in on a cause which already is suspect, and then to shorten the name as if the polio virus is synonymous with the inflammation that causes the paralysis.

And one of the great strengths of your book is that it’s not that the polio virus doesn’t exist or isn’t involved. It’s involved in a much more complex story. And that story explains what medical professionals. It explains their error, as well as the phenomenology of the disease itself. Yeah, that was this thing called Coke’s postulates, which is essentially the, I would say at the time, a fairly right.

A good step in the right direction is to assume that infection had one source, that there was one source of disease. If we could find it and inject it into another healthy specimen and confirm that it affected that specimen in the same way, then we had isolated the cause of the disease. Sure, it makes sense, probably has, you know, advance the cause of science quite a bit. Unfortunately, yes and no.

It’s advanced it in a way. But it’s a classic example of a rule from complicated systems applied to a complex system. The idea that if this virus and this disease are really related, that nobody who’s got the virus should fail to have the disease, and nobody who’s got the disease should fail to have the virus. No, that’s just simply not going to be true. So has it done some good? Probably.

Has it done more good than harm? That is a much more difficult question. Yeah. Yeah. Well, keep in mind the state of things in which it was born from at the time. You might consider it an advance, given the insane medical theories that were circulating at the time. So, yes, you’re absolutely right, it’s not great, but it was an improvement on some things at the time and did advance the cause of microbiology, of science in general, of medicine in some way.

But unfortunately, when I say polio without me having to air quote it every time, I speak of polio generically, in the context of paralysis from something, and unfortunately, they focused on a single virus as the cause, even when they knew there were multiple viruses, bacteria and other environmental factors that could cause nearly the same thing. So, as I was mentioning, going back to the original, that’s funny, discovery was 1894, Rutland, Vermont.

Go to any website and they’ll tell you that was the original polio outbreak in the United States. Horses died, dogs died, chickens died. Okay, strange. Why did that happen? Well, you know, some more sleuths beyond. Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but beyond strange, because this is exactly why it’s so important to think in terms of complex systems. A virus is going to have difficulty infecting. The ability to infect one creature effectively comes at the cost of infecting other creatures.

So they tend to be specific. The idea that this virus emerges out of nowhere and is capable of infecting and apparently spreading between animals from many different clades is suspect. On its face, it suggests a different kind of cause. And so if you’re looking at this from a complicated systems perspective, you say, well, okay, viruses spread between creatures. These are creatures. They’re all, you know, vertebrates, vertebrates, right.

And so, anyway, you can talk yourself into believing that, yes, this meant that, okay, the virus is just very capable of spreading between these many creatures. But the places where viruses spread between many creatures, there’s a story to be discovered evolutionarily. For example, viruses that spread between humans and domesticated animals, obviously, there’s an advantage to being able to hop that particular gap. So something that is capable of speaking swine and human has an advantage.

Birds have a disproportionate capacity to distribute something across barriers because they fly. So anyway, there’s always an evolutionary story. In this case, a disease comes out of nowhere shortly after the civil war and is spreading sort of incoherently between many different species. That’s a mega. That’s funny. Yeah, it is. It’s actually the same. That’s funny. That smallpox has. If you’ve ever read anything about smallpox, you know, a disease that seems to infect cowmaids through scratches on their hand from milking cows.

And the vaccine, which is really an inoculation, it’s not a true vaccine in the modern understanding of. It, was derived in a way of an animal specific infection that could somehow grant humans to a. To immunity. It’s a. It’s a strange, strange story. You should definitely say. That’s funny. If you start reading very much about the smallpox. Oh, no, forest, you’re not going to mess up my understanding of smallpox.

I’m sorry. That’s number three in the hopper. I’m working on it. No, please, please leave that one intact. Okay, we will leave that one alone. Your epidemiological history of the world is safe. So, back to the matter at hand. Rutland, Vermont, 1894. Animals, horses. They even sent these animals, mind you, to forensics, where they would do cross sections of their spinal cords. And they confirmed, hey, poliomyelitis. They caught it because, remember, this is 130, 40 years ago.

And they said what they saw, which is gray lesions of the spinal cord, so they called it poliomyelitis. They were being truthful. They were being accurate according to the definition of the term at the time. So with a minor bit of curiosity, such as I had, I started going through what was the most prevalent medical journal at the time, which is the Boston medical Journal. At that time, Boston was the epicenter of all science and medicine in the world.

It had been Paris for quite a while, and it was slowly moving to Boston. They have an incredible history of documenting science and medical progress in that journal. You can get it online for free. So what does a curious person like me to do? I start reading through it, saying, odd. What did they have to say about this outbreak? They didn’t know that polio only infected animals at the time.

They were years. They were decades away from understanding that. So in my research, I discovered that there was an outbreak the year earlier, something that I had never seen covered before. It was a tiny article that mentioned, I think, 24, 25, 26 people had. I can’t remember if they had died or had become infected. And it was interesting in that it was a year earlier. I had never heard of it.

And it was fairly in the same region of the country. It was just outside of Boston, which Vermont’s fairly close. So that was enough of a. That’s funny. And then, oh, that’s really funny. That made me start thinking, wait a minute, something’s going on here, perhaps regionally at this time, that may have had some impact on what they were calling the first epidemic of polio. So with the DDT story hanging over my head, which at the time, I thought was pure folly, I laughed at people who said that DDT had something to do with polio.

With that in mind, I said, okay, let’s pretend maybe there’s some truth to it. And I started researching DDT and discovered it wasn’t put into civilian use until after world war two. It had been invented decades earlier, but was never discovered to really have the incredible pesticide use case that it did. And it really was first used in world war two at scale. At scale. So hold on a second.

DDT, even if we back it up to its invention rather than it’s being deployed in a civilian context, it’s still way too late to account for the earliest outbreaks of poliomyelitis, right? Correct. Nowhere near. It doesn’t make sense at all. If DDT is the cause of polio, it doesn’t make sense. There’s no way, because we clearly, clearly had a problem decades earlier, 50 years earlier, made no sense at all.

But as I mentioned, I said, okay, if there is some truth to this, perhaps. Perhaps there was some other environmental agent that was introduced into that area at the time that perhaps had some effect. So, you know, that’s actually the story of the entire book, is me researching a profound invention which is never told. We don’t know the story of this, and I’m trying to keep your viewers in suspense.

And it was something that was so profoundly shocking to me that I had never heard this story. And the correlation of space and time was so intense, I just couldn’t believe no one had ever stumbled across this story. And that’s sort of the excitement with which I wrote the book. Yeah. So I can sort of cut to the chase here, if you like. Yeah. Let’s put it this way.

The book is so well done. I don’t think it really removed. You know, there is a spoiler here, and I guess, you know, for those who want to do it, maybe they should put this on pause, go read your book, and then come back and hit play. But I think we’re going to end up having to get into this for those who are willing to accept the spoiler so that you have some idea why this is a compelling hypothesis.

And again, I’m not saying it’s true either. But the question is, in light of the mainstream hypothesis and your competing hypothesis, which explains more and assumes less, that’s the scientific question, anyway. Yeah. You want to forge ahead? Yeah. The only reason there, you even mentioned spoiler alert is because the book is written in a way. There is a narrative to it. There is a story there that hopefully people find entertaining while also being informative.

But I discovered that in New England at that very time, there was an invasive species of moth that had been begun destroying nearly every flora and fauna across the region. It was called the gypsy moth, and it was an incredible, horrible event, if you’ve ever seen pictures of it, and maybe I’ll send you a couple pictures you can put up on your screen for those who are watching, of the devastation this insect caused.

I mean, it was mind blowing. It looks apocalyptic to see these enormous heirloom 150 year old trees being absolutely destroyed by this creature. Completely denuded. Yes, exactly. Completely denuded. And I don’t know if you’re going to tell this part of the story, but I don’t want to miss the fact that if we zoom out from iatrogenic harm, doctor caused harm, and we zoom even past industrial society, there’s a question about just human error.

And the story of the gypsy moth is also in this very list. This is not the usual story of an invasive species where we don’t know who, you know, what sack of whatever it rode in on, and all we know is the rough date at which people first noticed that it exists somewhere. You’ve got this story historically nailed to a fairly well. You want to describe where the gypsy mouse came from? Yeah.

As you mentioned, it’s not typical that an invasive species such as kudzu or something can be traced to a single person on a single trip. For whatever reason, a Frenchman who had moved to the United States in hopes of a better life had begun to cultivate more hardy caterpillars because the silk producing caterpillars were prone to disease. The domesticated ones that all silk is created from, he was studying them and cross breeding them and trying different varieties.

And at the time, I suppose the danger of invasive species was poorly understood. And he brought a boatload of different insects over in his attempt to try and breed a more hardy version of something that could produce silk. So just to connect this up one, we’ve got the civil war, which interrupts the flow of cotton from the south. So there was desire for a hardy silk moth. Caterpillar was greater because the value of silk was greater since its competing product wasn’t widely available, the knowledge of the hazard of invasive species was not well developed at the time.

And the folly of attempting to crossbreed distantly related moths was not evident yet because the understanding of what would make crossbreeding likely to work was not well understood either. So these are all instances of there’s the historical connection to cotton and the civil war, which just grounds the story so beautifully in history, but also the crudeness of our biological understanding, resulting in an error that has effectively permanent ecological implications and much beyond, as your book explores.

So, yeah, pick up the story of what happened to that frenchman’s gypsy moths. Yeah. I’m waiting for all first year students who intend on studying science to be given a plaque that says what could possibly go wrong and to make them hang it in every lab, every classroom they teach, in every lab they conduct experiments in that they need to be reminded that humans are, in fact, very powerful.

They do have the ability to affect things in a way that they don’t understand. We have the power to screw things up at a level we cannot appreciate, our ability to make them better. We’re pretty good at it as species go, but, wow, does it lag behind our ability to mess up something that works? Yeah. The law of unintended consequences has yet to lose a single battle. Unfortunately, I worry about that with antibiotics.

I’m very concerned that antibiotics will one day, we will have been proven to have been wrong to ever use them in the first place due to creation, due to intracellular bacteria and other things that we may cause. And there are no more bacteria, no more antibiotics left that may control them. Now, currently, from our current perspective, they appear to be a win win. I’m concerned one day, evolutionary speaking, from a microbial perspective, we may, in fact be setting the grounds for a superbug that can’t be controlled.

Well, I don’t know that. Yeah, I appreciate that you’re saying this. You know, you’re being very careful. You’re saying what you know and what you suspect, and that’s exactly how it should be done. But I do think it makes sense. I should just tell you. In the book that Heather and I wrote in Hunter Gatherer’s guide to the 21st century, we said that the three greatest medical advancements in human history were vaccines, antibiotics, and surgery.

We wrote that before COVID which has caused us to rethink the vaccine question. Sure. We are also and have been very skeptical of the way antibiotics are used. And so far, my illusions are intact with respect to surgery, but let me just say, and I want you to put your position on the table here, too. Sure. My position is, in the end, we are very likely to discover that vaccines have a place, but that the technology by which they are produced is very important, and we’ve made wrong turns.

Adjuvants in particular, are a devastating error in vaccine technology history. We’ve also made an error thinking that we should be vaccinating against any disease for which we can come up with a useful inoculation. And we’ve also had our mechanisms for testing safety and effectiveness gamed by people with a perverse incentive because they’re making money. So my guess would be where we ultimately get if humanity survives long enough to figure out what we’ve actually done to ourselves, we will discover that antibiotics and vaccines are a precious technology that must be deployed very carefully for benefit, to exceed harm, and that the willy nilly use of antibiotics and vaccines has created huge self inflicted wounds over numerous generations and will be recorded as a great error of medicine.

Well, I would respond by saying, don’t read any more of my books. Enjoy your life. You’ve got a great life. You’re a happy guy. You’re a smart guy. Your vision of the world is very, very good and very rosy. Compared to mine, I would say, just enjoy yourself. Don’t read. It’s not like that for us. I have a feeling, based on your first of all, I want to know what’s true, and the reason I want to know what’s true is because it allows me I can’t do anything about the harm I’ve done to myself or my family already.

But I can certainly reduce harm going forward, the better I understand things. So as much as there is a part of me that does not want my bubbles burst if they need to be burst because they’re incorrect, that’s where I am obligated to go and where I ultimately know I will be better for having done it. But I should also point out, you probably don’t know my history with telomeres, senescence, and cancer.

Is that a story that has not crossed your I apologize. No, there’s nothing to apologize for. You. There’s no reason you should know it. But when I was a graduate student, I was chasing down an evolutionary hypothesis about why we grow feeble and inefficient with age. And I was doing this. I had no eye on medicine or treatment or reversing aging or anything like that. I was just interested in the evolutionary puzzle, and I ran up against an obstacle to my research there was something that just didn’t add up.

And it was something that I knew if I could figure out what was wrong with what I knew, that I could get all the way to an important answer. And so, anyway, I spent a lot of time working on it. What it ultimately turned out to be was that the mice that we use for model organisms in laboratories, including for drug safety testing, had evolved in captivity in response to conditions in the breeding colony.

Now, this is where that much we can say, I was able, with the help of a, now I understand, terrible colleague, to establish that wild mice do not have long telomeres, even though science had decided that all mice have long telomeres, telomeres being the genetic sequences, the repetitive genetic sequences at the ends of chromosomes, which appear to control how many times a cell can divide before it stops.

So obviously, as a relation potentially, to. To why we grow inefficient with age. If your cells can’t divide anymore, they can’t repair damage and maintain the body. But in any case, in captivity, mice had evolved ultra long telomeres. That part is now certain, the hypothesis that I advanced, which is actually now the only hypothesis left standing. So the probable explanation for that has to do with the breeding cutoff, that for economic reasons, in order to produce laboratory mice at the most economically efficient rate, you only breed animals up until something like eight or nine months, and then you throw them out and replace them with young mice.

Because young mice breed faster, that caused the elongation of the telomeres. And the elongation of the telomeres looks poised to allow these animals to repair any damage that does not outright kill them, at the cost of making them incredibly prone to cancer. I see. Interesting. Now, I think I have no way of knowing what actually goes on inside of pharma. I think Pharma did not know that the mice were rigged in a way that would make toxic things look safe.

When I discovered the elongation of the telomeres as a consequence of evolution in the breeding colonies. But once I did publish that result, I believe they understood that actually their profits were dependent on maintaining those broken mice. And we have seen numerous drugs, vioxxeldane, Phenfen, erythromycin, all the nsaids that do heart damage. I don’t think it is heart damage. I think it’s body wide damage that we notice in the heart, because the heart is a special organ.

But in any case, believe me, I’m under no illusions about the goodness of medical research or the publicly minded nature of our policies. I know that 20 years after I figured out that the breeding colonies had resulted in the elongation of mouse telomeres, there is no official record that we’ve fixed anything, so presumably the mice are still broken anyway. So that’s where I’m coming from. I’m actually interested to hear more about that, if I can locate it somehow, in that I know that scientific studies often are rigged ahead of time, in that if you want to maximize the effect, you use mice.

If you want to minimize the effect, you use primates. There’s all sorts of tricks you can use to game the system to get an outcome that your donors and grantors are going to be happy with. And unfortunately, human beings are not the rational creatures we think ourselves to be. We are as prone to putting our thumb on the scale as anyone else, and that has served the cause of humanity very poorly in this complete faith that humans are completely rational and are not prone to bias and exaggeration.

And your grant money coming in and your PhD being reviewed favorably, I would say it a little differently. I would say we are rational, pending a definition of rational. But the problem is we have competing interests. So if you want science to work your interests, you can’t have a financial interest in finding x if ultimately it will turn out that y is the right answer. Right. But what we have now is a system in which all of the proxies that should flow to those who have the most far sighted view of scientific phenomena, those proxies, are all broken.

And so we’ve got lots of people making careers misleading us in ways they may not think of it in that way. But as you point out, it’s very easy to rig a study. You could do that intentionally, and some do. You could do it inadvertently, and you could do it structurally. The system could be built. Like I said, many of the people who use mice that are broken such that they will make toxic drugs look safe, presumably don’t know that they are using rigged animals.

Right? They just do it. And the point is, the whole system is built to spit out answers that are financially useful, not medically. So. You know, oddly, you and I have, and I desperately hope that you’ve reached a conclusion that is a bit too strong. But you and I have both found jaw dropping failures of scientific inquiry that have led, I believe, to substantial human harm about which we are unwilling to go back and look.

Yeah. The question that you posed to me about whether antibiotics are in fact, on the whole, will they be in the positive column or the negative column for humanity? Obviously, can’t answer that for a long time. My overarching belief is that nothing is free. There is nothing in nature that is free. Everything has a cost. We may hide the cost, we may delay the cost, we may disperse the cost in such a way it’s spread out over a bigger population and we don’t notice the effects as much.

But regardless, the entropy of nature will always win in such a way that there is a cost. You may not be able to see it, but it’s there. So with antibiotics, I’ve yet to find any technical or scientific invention that has been able to break that rule. And with antibiotics, my fear is it’s a chronological delay that we may 1 day pay the price. It has certainly been a benefit for us.

Now, no question about it. 50 years from now we will see. I hope that it holds up well. But you have to ask that question in two different ways. Obviously, we are behaving very stupidly with antibiotics. We’re giving them to animals that aren’t sick in order to slightly increase the rate at which they put on mass prior to slaughter. That’s an insane waste of a precious technology. On the other hand, you don’t die from gangrene.

And so the question is, let’s say that the only thing we did with antibiotics was make surgery, make it tolerably risky by hedging out the risk of a serious runaway infection. Would it have negative consequences? I have no doubt that it does. In fact, the other thing you probably don’t know about me is that my dissertation was on the logic of trade offs, which my claim is every biological paradox, things that we can’t resolve, gets resolved once you realize that not only are tradeoffs ubiquitous, but that there are rules that govern them.

And you can begin to understand why the particular trade offs that you see function the way they do. For example, why would you expect a highly contagious virus not to be able to infect numerous different species? That’s a trade off, and there are rules that govern them. I agree with you. There’s a cost to be paid for antibiotics, and anybody who thinks there isn’t is kidding themselves. The question is, if they were used with wisdom, would that cost exceed the benefit? And that’s where I guess you and I differ.

I suspect that wise use of antibiotics would leave them well in the positive column. Will the abuse of antibiotics, the way we abuse them now, result in a net negative? Yeah, probably. Yeah. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out. But surgery for sure. To me, the mechanics of surgery, of fixing people’s car engines and all of that. Certainly, I would easily place that in the clear winter category.

We have benefited from surgeons in surgery and improvements in that, no doubt about it. Yeah. But we also see the same pattern. Sorry, again, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but we also see the same pattern where a precious technology, right, the ability to straighten a bone that’s been horrifyingly broken and won’t restore itself. Right. The ability to cut a tumor out of you that would otherwise crowd out a vital organ.

These are obviously highly valuable. On the other hand, some of what has to be corrected is also the result of harm that industrial civilization is doing to us. And we see the absolute abuse of this technology in ways that are purely harmful. For example. What do you mean, for example? Well, I would say, let’s just take the low bar, the surgical destruction of the functional reproductive anatomy of a child.

I would say that that is a despicable crime against humanity. And the fact that the person doing it, or one of the people involved, is a surgeon doesn’t it makes it worse in my book, rather than better. So, anyway, we see the abuse of surgery the same way we see the abuse of antibiotics and vaccines. And, you know, I think your framing of the question is right. What is, in the end, will more good have been done by this technology than harm? And I would just add the question, were we wise about these things? Would the net value be positive in the end? And I sure hope so.

Yeah. In the same way I question antibiotics, I certainly question vaccines, whether the net result is a benefit to humanity. I happen to have fallen on the negative side, but I’m happy and certainly willing to admit that I’m wrong. I mean, this is something I talk about all the time, is humble curiosity. I wish everyone approached the world with curiosity, in that they want to understand how things work and at the same time bring humility with you.

To admit. To be perfectly willing to admit you may have been wrong about something. So if everyone approached science and everything beyond with that mindset, I think we’d be a whole lot better off. But regardless, back to the polio story. The initial realization that the gypsy moth had been released by this frenchman didn’t concern him greatly, because, like I said, the nature of invasive species weren’t truly or fully understood.

It did concern him. Evidently, there was concern. He left the house that he was living in, and within a few years, throngs of these creatures started to appear. And because of, from what we understand, the prickly nature of their backs. The local birds weren’t properly designed or evolved to consume them, so they thrived, and they grew to millions and millions and millions and began to decimate the northeastern countryside.

The only pesticide they had available to them to use at the time was something called Paris green, which was, strangely enough, actually a dye used to color wallpaper and children’s toys. But it was also known to kill animals, such was its toxicity. And they used it, and it didn’t work. It just essentially had no effect. So a giant search was launched in an attempt to figure out some way to stem the tide of the gypsy moth, which was essentially destroying the entire northeast of the United States.

And that’s when they happened across a new pesticide, which they called lead arsenate, which was essentially the combination of lead and arsenic. Together, the two of them, when mixed properly, it was extremely viscous, and it wouldn’t wash off of things like Paris green would. Now, at that time, most people didn’t use pesticides at all. It just wasn’t popular enough to use because the gypsy moth was so prevalent and was decimating the countryside.

There were massive campaigns to. To essentially coat every living surface with this pesticide. They didn’t realize its toxicity, but it became apparent very quickly, because the very year, the summer after the pesticide was invented was the summer that first giant outbreak of poliomyelitis was discovered in Boston. A coincidence of time and space that I just found two impossible, too strange to ignore. And that’s really when I thought, aha.

Maybe there’s a connection here. Maybe there was another pesticide which had something to do with the polio epidemics. And keep in mind, when I say polio at this stage in time, I mean paralysis. Paralysis. And if I understand the story correctly, you can see in the fact of the gypsy moth spreading a human response to it, the toxicity of which is underappreciated, that this would also mirror the phenomenology of an epidemic.

Right. If you have the spreading of a moth from the place of its introduction, and it’s decimating people’s trees and their crops spreading out from where it was first introduced, it would leave the impression, the same impression, or similar one, to something that was spreading person to person, right. It would give the impression on the map of something moving across the landscape, when, of course, it’s the moth moving across the landscape and human behavior potentially compounding the.

Or potentially causing the medical response to it when the two things are, in fact, not connected. Yeah. In fact, you can trace the spread of polio in the beginning, this is, mind you, late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds. You can trace its spread by tracing the migration of the gypsy moth because as they moved, so too did the pesticide. And it’s remarkable if this is, again, this is some napkin math here of me sort of looking at numbers and counts of things and doing it very roughly.

But it was remarkable. The correlation was fairly strong at this point. Oh, go ahead. I’m taking a turn here. Let’s stay here. Yeah. You mentioned Paris Green, and mind you, I’d never heard of Paris Green until I read your book. Paris Green was an effective pesticide in one regard, but not effective because you didn’t know where you’d sprayed it, and it washed off. So it required constant respraying.

Is that correct? That’s right. Yeah. It was white and sticky, and you could tell where you’d sprayed it, and it couldn’t be washed off, which should be a little harbinger of things to come, white and sticky. And so you have. Yeah, I guess I will let you get to your turn in the story here, but before we leave, Paris Green, what made it toxic? It was arsenic. It was, you know, arsenic was essentially, unfortunately, a popular medicinal treatment at the time.

People who haven’t read this chapter in medical history should know that metals were thought to have, essentially, far greater positive effects on human anatomy than negative. They understood that there was toxicity related to metal ingestion. Of course, they knew that this has been going on for thousands of years. They thought, as we’ve just discussed, the positives outweighed the negatives. Children were given mercury powders to deal with teething, or dentition, as they called it.

They assumed that the eruption of teeth provided a pathway into the immune system, which may actually be true. And they thought, okay, well, give them some mercury. It’ll clean out their bowels because it made you have massive GI problems, and then disease will leave the body. And that was the beginning. There were multiple other medicinal treatments that involved arsenic and other metals. It was a horrible chapter in medical history.

Right. So this is fascinating to me because the extent to. I mean, okay, why was mercury being given by doctors to people? It was being given by doctors for a number of reasons. Because it was an effective biocide and because it caused the abrupt purging of the bowels. Right. So doctors knew something. They had a crude understanding about how to influence the body. There’s a degree of truth here.

If you had something in your bowels, you know, if you had. If a microbe had gotten in and was causing germ warfare to unfold in your bowels, making you sick. Mercury would likely cause the purging of whatever was present. So it’s not like there’s not a. Everything else along with it. Everything else along with it. But why is that the response of the body to mercury? Because it’s a horrifying toxin.

And the point is, the body gets rid of horrifying toxins. Right. If the body has reason to think that you have ingested something that’s putting out a toxin, that’s causing your mind to become cloudy, it causes you to vomit. This is why alcohol poisoning causes people to throw up. The body is trying to purge something that’s toxifying it. You can get the same effect if you make yourself sufficiently dizzy, because the body has this mechanism for, you know, it doesn’t know why you can’t stand up.

Maybe you’ve eaten a toxin, so it causes you to vomit. In that case, it’s useless. But the point is, doctors trying to operate the small number of levers that they have that cause the body to do anything that might be useful in the context of some disease are doing something as insane as giving patients mercury. Not only patients, but infants. I mean, yeah, it’s hard to imagine anything that crazy.

It was as common as you might give a chocolate, a teething child, tylenol today. It was that common. It was not a fringe treatment. It was not a tin foil hat treatment, like, of some weirdo essential oil crazy mom. I’m saying that facetiously for your listeners who use essential oils. But it was so common that everyone did it. It was expected your children would teeth. It was expected they might get sick.

And you needed to prevent this by completely nuking every possible bacteria that lived in their intestines to prevent it. Now, well, interesting that you mentioned Tylenol. Right? Because Tylenol isn’t safe either. But this is a great way for people to understand how insane this mindset was and how normal it seemed at the time. The idea that we treat Tylenol as a no big WHOOP. Tylenol is a tremendously dangerous drug.

The idea that we think of it as safe enough to give to children is preposterous. Frankly, I don’t think it’s safe enough to give to anybody. I certainly don’t take the stuff. I do take aspirin. I’m hoping you won’t tell me that’s an error. But in any case, yes, we did give infants mercury. We still, I remember as a kid getting quite spooked by a 60 minutes report about mercury amalgam in dentistry, which was at the time the common way of filling cavities.

Maybe it was the only way. Yeah. Irony upon ironies. The dentists who prescribed mercury amalgams for cavities evidently didn’t understand that cavities can fix themselves. Your body can heal itself, and they are not ratchet strap holes forming in your teeth that never go back. So again, the body’s ability to heal itself with patience and with some suffering will stupefy the modern listener, because essentially, we’ve been taught that all infection is bad, all disease is bad, all suffering is bad.

Imagine if I were to tell you that your child needn’t ever exercise because we have an injection of steroids that will build their muscles for them somehow. We might laugh at the suggestion of that. But if I were to say your child needn’t ever get an infection, they’ll be better off just getting a slew of vaccines their whole childhood. That’s perfectly fine and acceptable. The reality is they’re better off.

Their immune system will function better. They will have a lifetime of immunity rather than a booster addiction for the rest of their life if they just get the infection naturally. This is certainly the case with measles, chicken pox, mumps, all sorts of infections. Your children were better off if they just got it naturally. They would never need another booster again, and there was essentially no risk, particularly in healthy populations.

Yeah. We know enough at this point to say that the best thing you could conceivably do from the point of view of health is to provide an environment with as little evolutionary novelty in it as possible. Right. And that if you provided that environment, then the body is in a great position to take care of itself. And that what we are doing, what we have now seen with COVID and what you reveal in the case of polio is likely.

The case is we are taking unintended consequences of technological advancement and compounding the damage with a complicated systems view of medicine. So we’re just, you know, it’s the old lady who swallowed the fly for symptoms caused by cures caused by other cures. Right? It’s. It’s. It’s a frightening picture. If there’s any success to be mentioned about the smallpox vaccine, I apologize for this footnote. Oh, no. It is the timing.

It was the recognition that a healthy person could battle infection more easily and readily than an unhealthy person. So the inoculation of smallpox, which, again, I will stress it, was not really a vaccine at all. You were simply giving people the smallpox infection itself. It was the timing of it that if there was success to be had, it was because they recognized healthy people can suffer through this infection with very few ill effects.

So if you’re at a point of optimum health, let’s go ahead and get it over with. You’re going to catch it anyway. Back to the purging of the bowels and the metal and mercury powder. If you really go back in time, you will find an 1840. Hold on, hold on. Sorry. My mind is trying to correct for the upheaval that you’re sorry. I apologize. It wasn’t enough. But let me push back, then tell me what I have wrong in the story.

All right. Smallpox was not present in the new world until Europeans arrived in 1492. Is that right? As far as I think. As far as you know, that’s true, yes. Okay. It devastated the new world population, which at the time is estimated to have been between 50 million and 100 million people between north and South America. I’m not asking you to go through this with a fine tooth comb.

I’m just trying to figure out where the story, I understand, is an error. Okay. I think there were native populations that were particularly susceptible to the effects of the smallpox. Smallpox infection. Smallpox infection, which came with the Spaniards. The native populations were disproportionately healthy because. Well, because they lived in the environment that their ancestors lived in, for the most part. And technology had not begun to introduce the various influences that degrade health.

So they were recognized by the Europeans, certainly, to be healthy and robust people. So the question then, I can see a couple ways to go here, but the model that you’ve just put on the table is that the smallpox vaccine, mostly what it did was give people smallpox when they were in good health such that they were more likely to fend it off. And then they develop natural immunity rather than the textbook version in which the attenuated virus provides the immune system with a trial run that isn’t highly virulent.

And then when they encounter actual smallpox, they fend it off without even knowing that it has gotten into their system. The question then is why, if that model is correct, was the native population in the Americas susceptible to smallpox when it arrived? Well, let me just mention something as a lead into the answer to that. The smallpox vaccine, as I’m labeling it an inoculation. There is no idea what is in that inoculation.

Even today, scientists don’t know what’s in it. And the reason that is, is because it was grown in the tissue of different animals constantly. They might lacerate the belly of a calf or a cow, put some of the solution in there and grow it. And they did it with goats and with rabbits and with pigs and all kinds of different animals. So when we talk about smallpox, we don’t really know what it was.

We don’t know conclusively what the Indians died of. Sure, maybe they developed postules on their skin from an infection that the Europeans brought over. We don’t know what that was zoonotically or because of all the animals. The vaccine had been passaged through over 100 or so years. We don’t know what it is. So I can’t sit here and say conclusively, I know what north american natives died of, because there’s no telling what it was.

There’s no telling what they brought over, given the rampant, irresponsible development of that vaccine. And the vaccine itself was so inherently dangerous that people were terrified of it. It was. The vaccine itself was rolled out in the 1970s, not because smallpox was eradicated, but because people just still were having too many horrible reactions to it. And so it’s difficult for me to conclusively say what Native Americans were dying of, given the Frankenstein nature of whatever is in that syringe.

And you can go look at it today, and scientists will not be able to tell you what’s in the smallpox vaccine. They have no idea. Now, I’m sure if there was enough money, they could sequence it, and perhaps they have, but were too horrified to publish the results. But it’s not anything, I think, naturally occurring. I think it is sort of the antiquated equivalent of the coronavirus. All right, well, I’m going to have to chew on that.

I was not expecting the concern to be over the content of the vaccine. Well, and now keep in mind, whatever was in the vaccine was perfectly capable of replicating. You know, you mentioned attenuated virus. There was nothing they couldn’t do that. They had no clue that passaging viruses over multiple generations of life would sometimes attenuate the virulence of the virus. They had no understanding of that at the time.

They were just trying to keep it alive. They thought there was a cowpox virus, vaccinia, as they called it, that if they could just keep it alive like a sourdough starter, they could, you know, just scratch the skin of people and, hey, they would get a very mild infection compared to smallpox. Now, the reality is it was probably the same thing, so they didn’t know the difference. Do you doubt the Jenner story of Jenner, having noted the immunity of milk maids to small things, certainly that.

I’m. I’m sorry, bruh. I told you to stop. I told you to stop. It’s lore. It’s absolute lore. No, no, look, he was fraud. He was a scientific fraud who paid for his PhD or doctors at a fake university. He was laughed at by all his peers. Don’t do this. Don’t go down the rabbit hole. It’s. It’s horrible. You don’t. Wait, wait. No, no. I mean, look, we have no.

We have no choice here. I’m just trying to under. Look, I’m not. I’m going to follow the evidence, and I’m going to figure out what I believe. But at the moment, you’re telling me something that I have not heard before. All right, just for the listeners trying to keep up, the story is that Jenner and apparently the story. This is the effectively european version of the story. There are several discoveries of the same phenomenon from different cultures, but the european version is that Jenner notes milkmaids are immune to smallpox and comes to understand that they have picked up a closely related disease, cowpox, which is sufficiently close that it results in the immune system developing natural immunity that causes it to manage smallpox without incident.

That’s funny. Have we ever heard of that story in any other. Any other research paper ever published? Have you ever heard a similar story to that? I haven’t. That’s funny. What do you mean? You would expect it to show up in the story in which the pattern was clearest, just exactly the way you expect our understanding of genetics to emerge from Mendel’s messing with peas at Loci. That just happened to work in a simple fashion.

If he’d worked with any complex trait, he wouldn’t have seen the pattern that he saw. But it happened that we had. So who knows how many people did an experiment with some trait that is multigenic, where you couldn’t get a clear pattern, but Mendel happened to be messing with the wrinkling of the seeds, etcetera, which were inherited in a simple fashion that we now call Mendelian. But anyway, the point is, you would expect the story to show up where the story was simple enough for us to grasp it.

So I still like the idea. Even if this is the only case where we have two diseases closely enough related that you get cross reactivity sufficient for one disease to function as a vaccine against the other. You don’t believe that story? Well, I have never heard of another case of a similar virus being used in its pure form as an inoculative agent against its sister virus. I mean, think about the genetics technology we have at our disposal right now, and we still cannot find anything similar enough to substitute for its more virulent cousin.

We have to create things from scratch or old school vaccine production. We passage it and hope that it becomes less virulent, or we nuke it with formaldehyde and hope that we inactivate it. But the notion that there was a cousin virus that just happened to be found on the udders of cows and it inoculated people safely for a closely related virus, I’ve never seen it happen anywhere else.

And given the technology available at the time to know these things and to accurately document what was happening, it rings as implausible to me, particularly given the horrific nature of the smallpox vaccine itself. It does not have the shining diamond story wrapped around it that the polio vaccines do. Even amongst people, you know, who would differ with me on general vaccine opinions that they would probably admit, you know, smallpox vaccine, it was.

It was horrible. It was not something you really wanted your children to get because it caused a lot of problems, a lot of death. I mean, this is vaccinia. This is. They had a name for dying of the vaccine. It was called vaccinia. So anyway. All right, well, no, no, you don’t need to apologize. Let’s put it this way. I am left with two questions. One of them is the Jenner story itself, as separate from the question of the utility and safety of the smallpox vaccine.

And I now know from having watched the COVID shenanigans up close and having read about polio, that there’s always the possibility of a pattern of disease amelioration being credited to a vaccine that was actually not involved or involved in a way that was not obvious, not what it says in the textbook. So, anyway, I’m. I don’t. I don’t know what to think about these things. I am definitely, like many people, in the process of discovering that much of what I thought about medicine and disease is not entirely true, and in some cases, not true at all.

Which is why, at the top of this, I raised the issue of spanish flu, which is a story I thought I understood. And it turns out, until you know about bacterial pneumonia and about aspirin toxicity, you don’t understand the spanish flu either, right? So all of these stories have a valorization and an oversimplification that causes us to rethink the whole picture when we begin to see how unlikely it is for diseases to jump from nature into people, how the examples of epidemics that are used to frighten us aren’t what we were led to believe they were, and how the technologies that we were told addressed these may not have been involved at all in some cases, and may not have been involved in the way we’ve been told in other cases.

So maybe we should get back to the story of polio so we can see how that plays out. I will say that you use the word valorization. That’s a really great word, because that is the problem. Humans want the hero. We want the heroic story of science over evil, the evil microbe. And even if the scientists themselves have conducted all trials and research and vaccine development, everything else with absolute precision and rationality, humans who don’t have that same amount of reasoning will swoop in and distort the story.

They will turn it into a myth and to lore of something that absolutely didn’t happen. And that’s essentially what happened later on with the polio vaccine. Unfortunately, the valorization of the vaccine was written in stone before it had even begun to be distributed. So back to the matter at hand. As I mentioned in 1841, there was actually a, I’m quoting, in the air epidemic of polio. Some twelve or 13 children were either second or killed.

And it was all the children, evidently, it had been mentioned in passing the article, were going through dentition, or had recently done it, and we know they were likely being given metallic medicine as treatment for whatever. But the cluster. The cluster was enough that it makes you think that there’s something going on. There is a vector here that is not purely environmental toxicity. There’s something else going on.

And you start to see that as you trace through the earliest polio epidemics, you have to start understanding that this is not purely poisoning from pesticide. There is something else to it that gives it the telltale sign of the vector of an advancing disease because of the clusters, of the way things happened. You see that? And early on, the earliest polio outbreaks were all rural, because, in my opinion, this is where pesticides were being used most aggressively.

But there was something to the fact that there was a viral component at work here. It wasn’t just a pesticide. So one of the telltale signs of polio, as they called it back then, was the full name of polio at that time, was acute polio, acute poliomyelitis of the anterior horn. And the anterior horn, if you’re looking down on your spinal column, the anterior is the front half of your spinal cord, that’s the part of the.

Where the neurons that run through there controlled movement. Neurons on the backside of your spinal cord control taste and sensitivity, and polio, for whatever reason, would only cause paralysis. It didn’t affect your sense of touch, it didn’t cause pain, which is what lesions on the back of your spinal cord could do. Now, all right, so here’s a major. That’s funny, right? Yes. Because you’re talking about something where a virus is ostensibly causing inflammation on the front of the spinal cord, but not the back.

And the same virus is apparently indifferent to whether it’s infecting people or chickens. This does not add up at some level because the specificity. There’s probably no chemical distinction between the neurons on the front side of your spine and the backside of your spine. If there is anything, it’s tiny at the level of tiny modifications of receptors, potentially. But the idea that the virus is so specific that it infects the front part of your spine, but it doesn’t care if you’re a chicken or a person.

That’s funny to me. Exactly. As you read through the early case reports of polo, you will start to pick apart the differences. You will see people that had seizures. Okay, this is not. This is not a hallmark of a polio infection. A polio infection, for those we don’t know. It’s an interoviral infection. It’s a virus that thrives in your gut, causes you to have diarrhea, all kinds of other problems, anything, you know, associated with gut poor gut health.

So wait, wait, wait. That is, again, that’s funny. Yes. An enterovirus that is at home in your gut, that is causing inflammation of the front side of the spine. First of all, that’s, again, a kind of an incoherent picture. The point is, it’s adapted to the gut, yet it finds itself in the spine, where it does a whole different kind of damage. It’s only in the front side of the spine, or generally.

So, yes. And then why, again, is it in the spine? Does the spine provide it some mechanism to leap from one individual to the next? Well, you’re begging the question here, but yes, interestingly enough, if your listeners don’t know this, the disease was often called infantile paralysis. Just so you know. Why infantile paralysis? Well, because it struck children. It struck babies, infants. It was very, very rare for a true intraviral polio infection to even infect an adult, most likely because they already had immunity to it.

Immunity, by the way, gained without any sort of paralysis and without any knowledge of themselves even having the infection themselves. But something happened around that time, human history, where suddenly these enteroviral infections appeared capable of paralyzing people, which is very, very odd that that would start happening, and particularly children. Now, one of the odd things, if I know there one more that’s funny, is the infection, the paralysis almost always started in their legs.

This was the hallmark understanding of polio. You remember, we start very generic and say people have lesions in their spinal cord and they’re kind of paralyzed. And then we start getting more specific in that its children, its infants, and hey, its only the front of their spinal cord, its not the back. They dont have sensitivity and pain, which are commonly associated with poisoning, with metallic poisoning or pesticide poisoning.

They get paralysis in the front side of their spinal cord. And if youve ever, do you remember the tycho race tracks, the little slot car racetracks you had as a kid, and you put your car in and it just races off. This is how neuronal tissue grows and how viral viruses that thrive within neuronal tissue, this is how they propagate. When they hit a neuronal channel, they can just shoot up.

They don’t like replicate at random, just sort of crossing organs here and there. When they hit that slot of neuronal tissue, they start going up. So if you can imagine your spinal cord infants, where the intestines rest directly against the bottom of the spinal cord, it’s kind of cutting to the end of the book. It’s one of my hypotheses. But essentially the paralysis starts in the bottom of the spinal cord, the part of the nervous system that rests directly against the intestines, a geographical proximity that just feels too significant to overlook.

And as soon as a virus hits the neuronal tissue, it doesn’t move backwards, it moves up, because again, it’s a highway that these certain enteroviruses propagate along. And it would start going up the spinal cord. And so you might start with a limp, limpness in the legs, and then it might move itself up and your spine might start having problems. And then eventually it would paralyze the muscles that allow you to expand your diaphragm and fill your lungs with air.

That’s essentially, that was the real danger with polio in terms of death, in that it could prevent you from inhaling and exhaling because the paralysis would start in your legs and work its way up. So, yeah, that’s funny about all the cases you read about polio, especially early on, are sometimes people developed seizures. Okay, it’s not polio. It’s not the way we define polio nowadays. Some people would develop extreme pain sensitivity.

Extreme like you couldn’t touch their leg without extreme pain. This is FDR. The american president famously had polio, as we describe it, now, had extreme pain sensitivity. A very odd side effect of something that’s decidedly not polio. But anyway, as these cases started to grow and more and more information came in, they started thinking that perhaps there are multiple viruses and bacteria that can cause this problem. And they were right.

They would infect experimental primates once again. They had sort of discovered, I think it’s the macaque that they could infect readily. They could infect them with polio virus, with something called coxsackievirus, with something called echovirus, certain bacteria. They discovered there was a plurality, microbes, that would do this exact same thing if injected directly into the nervous tissue. That was the problem, was they couldn’t understand how do these viruses and bacteria get into the nervous system in the first place? Because your mucosal immune system is incredibly robust and can protect your body from nearly anything.

I mean, think about what your dog eats from day to day and suffers no real ill effects from it. But their real conundrum was, how does this virus get into your nervous system? They just couldn’t understand it. So, okay, a couple things. One, the virus in the nervous system is a red flag for me. How so? Because I’m an evolution. No, I’m an evolutionary biologist. I think in terms of the ecology of creatures.

And although viruses aren’t technically creatures, we have to think of them in the same terms. They’ve still got to reproduce and get into new hosts to do it. There are viruses that utilize the nervous system as a way of getting from one person to another. Herpes viruses, for example, use the nervous system so we can describe their life history and see why. Neurons are a chosen location. They can hide from the immune system.

There they can travel to places where they then jump in ways that we understand from one person to another. It’s not obvious why an enterovirus is inhabiting the nervous system at all. I’ve never heard a description of how it gets from one person’s nervous system to the next. Maybe that description exists somewhere, but I don’t know it. But it is also fascinating that if you solve the problem of the virus getting into the nervous tissue, you can basically use nervous tissue as an environment, a growth medium, and you can cause the paralysis.

So the point is what this is pointing to which your book addresses beautifully, is the idea that, effectively, this virus may be perfectly capable of infecting your nervous tissue, and it may not have any reason to go there under normal circumstances, and no tendency to go there under normal circumstances. But something about human behavior is altering its likelihood of ending up there. And in our monkey model, what we find out is that by introducing things, by breaching barriers that are very well protected, we can actually induce the symptoms of polio just simply by getting a pathogen to replicate in an environment that it wouldn’t be finding itself in ordinarily.

That’s a very conspicuous pattern to me, and you mentioned briefly in passing here, the proximity of the intestine to the spinal cord. And this is a place where your book caused the dime to drop for me. You want to describe the pattern of development and how it alters that relationship and how it therefore is a match for your hypothesis? Sure. Yeah. This was also a sort of profound revelation as a curious person, as I mentioned, and was just reading and trying to understand the anatomy of the human body and how things grow.

If you look at a diagram of an adult human being, the bottom of their spinal cord ends well short of their intestines. It’s inches away, maybe more, depending on the human. If you look at the anatomy of an infant or child, their spinal cord reaches all the way to the top of their intestines. It sits directly behind their intestines. So as you grow from a child to a human, your body grows larger at a much higher rate than your spinal cord itself does, in such a way that your spinal cord, the bottom of it, ends up in a much different location for adults.

So if, in fact, there is something going on with the combination of pesticide abuse and enteroviral health in your gut, the geographical proximity of your spinal cord to your intestines is different in such a way for children than it is for adults, that it would certainly make sense that the virus could make the hop that, as you described very easily. When your intestines, those things teeming with millions of enterovirus, the virus rests directly against the spinal cord itself.

In an adult, even with their gut integrity completely ruined by rampant pesticide ingestion, the distance from their intestines to their spinal cord is so great that it’s not likely to ever make the hop. This is. Again, I will stress my hypothesis. We know that pesticides affect the membrane health of cellular membrane health. We know that it does strange things other than, let’s say, killing your microbiome, which is essentially normally in charge of protecting your body from the ravages of enteroviruses.

But it also affects the cell membranes in such a way, they become permeable. Now, there’s not a lot of studies about this, but they did study DDT and realized these things were starting to happen. My hypothesis is, if I may just summarize it, pesticides caused rampant problems during the lead arsenic era. They certainly caused rampant problems during the DDT era, which is polio as we know it from the 1940s to the mid 1950s.

The real problem was the way in which they wrecked the gut integrity of people’s health and allowed what were normally innocuous enteroviruses to flourish and to migrate into the nervous system. Somehow we don’t know that, but it feels like the best solution I’ve been able to come up with. Yeah, it’s a very parsimonious hypothesis, and if I can just rephrase it so it’s so crucial, I want people to understand it, maybe from two perspectives, what you’re arguing, and there’s a lot of interesting detail in the book.

For example, there’s a shift in the insect, the targeted insect, to one that eats fruit from one that eats leaves. What was the second moth that was being targeted in your book? Gosh, I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I can’t remember either. But in any case, there’s a move to an animal fruit. Excuse me. So because crops are now being directly targeted, and you’ve got this new pesticide that’s been formulated so that it doesn’t wash off, washing off is a problem because every time it rains, you have to reapply.

So a pesticide that doesn’t wash off is advantageous, and then it’s being sprayed directly onto fruit because they’re being attacked by the coddling moth. And then the point is, even if people are washing that fruit, which they will have done much less than they once would have, because they would be used to eating fruit without washing it, because there were no pesticides on the fruit to begin with originally.

So you’ve got people, even if they go to wash the pesticide off, the pesticide is resistant to being washed off because it’s rain tolerant. So they’re ingesting large amounts of it on the fruit, and you’ve got. So it’s going to. Metals are not well tolerated by the body because our ancestors would not have had high exposures regularly enough for the body to learn that trick evolutionarily. So your hypothesis is it is damaging the gut’s integrity that in infants and children, the proximity of the gut to the spine is quite close.

That that closeness, the breach in the intestines from the ingestion of pesticides, is facilitating the migration of viruses that are fundamentally gut. Viruses that do that are not hot, highly virulent. They are migrating through this path not because they have any ecological reason to do so, but because the pathway is now open, migrating into tissue where they’re demonstrated to have the capacity to reproduce in their reproductive cycle.

Once they’ve gotten into the spine, they are producing inflammation, poliomyelitis. And that this matches the pattern. Polio, it’s afflicting children. It is afflicting the neurons that are in the front of the spine, closest physically to the gut, and sparing the neurons in the back of the spine, which is farther from the gut, and sparing adults, because the spinal cord has moved physically away in the process of growth from the intestines.

So even if the gut in an adult is damaged, the pathway for the enterovirus to make it into the neuronal tissue is not available. So that is, at the very least, an elegant hypothesis to explain a highly complex phenomenon. It also has the attribute of explaining why addressing the enterovirus might have positive effects on polio. The point is, if there were no virus in that story, if metals were simply migrating from the gut into the spine and damaging tissue, then you would expect that no vaccine could possibly have any impact on that story.

But because an enterovirus is finding its way into the spinal cord, vaccinating against that enterovirus will actually potentially have a positive effect. But it’s not the place where you would naturally intervene in the story. It’s a very risky place to intervene in the story, and there’s a much more obvious place to intervene, which is at the level of not using pesticides with this effect, never putting them on anything anybody’s ever going to eat.

You know, protecting people from the metals would be the key way to do it, and I would. So how’s that so far? Is that, for some reason, beautiful rendition. I wish I could summarize as elegantly as you did. Let me add to that. There is another interesting bullet point that bolsters this hypothesis, which is the ineffectiveness of the salk vaccine. The Salk vaccine was essentially the first approved treatment for polio infections, and it differed in that it was injected, and, you know, people will think, well, there was a live virus and there was a attenuated virus, and that doesn’t really matter in this story.

The real difference between the salk vaccine, which was first introduced in 1954, pulled from the shelves in 1955 due to a manufacturing problem that killed a few people. It did not work. Flat out didn’t work. Now, maybe the reason why is it didn’t address the problem of the enteroviral infection. If it worked and granted you immunity in your bloodstream, that was fine. But whatever immunologist may be listening to this, I’m sorry for the cringe here.

The stratification between the mucosal immunity and your normal immunity are such that you can’t fight off an enteroviral infection by developing immunity in your bloodstream. It’s just not going to work. You have to do it in the gut. And that’s why the later oral polio vaccine, the one Sabin invented, which essentially started in 61 and then came online fully in 1963, it does work. It actually creates immunity to the polio virus infection, and it will prevent that infection from flourishing in your gut.

Now, there’s two problems if you want to go dark here. For dark horse, the vaccine only protects against one enterovirus. There’s several others that could cause the same problem, which is why the vaccine really didn’t make the numbers go up or down significantly. And it also is a live virus vaccine, which can occasionally revert to virulence, which means it’s currently the only reason the polio virus still exists in the world is probably due to the vaccine itself.

This is not tinfoil hat land. This is sort of acknowledged by scientists. They know that it probably naturally would have burned itself out by now. But unfortunately, the vaccine itself occasionally reverts back to its more virulent form, and it’s kept the polio virus alive longer than it should have. But, yes, you can’t create immunity to an intravirus with a injected vaccine, which is why scientists were so confused as to why the salk vaccine just didn’t appear to work very well.

Well, I mean, it did what it was supposed to in a lab. Yes, it created immunity to the viral infection. It didn’t stop the paralysis from happening, and they didn’t know that there was such a stark difference between what happens in your gut and what happens in the rest of your immune system. Yeah, we, of course, saw this with the so called COVID vaccines, too, where there was no acknowledgement of the distinction between mucosal immunity and systemic.

And to this day, I have yet to hear an explanation of why that was being ignored. But anyway, it is an important piece of immunology that I think many of us learned in the context of COVID this distinction, but you’ve elucidated its relevance here in the context of polio. Do you want to flesh out anything else about the story of the change in lead arsenide use or metals in medicine and anything else of that nature that you think should be on the table? Well, at a 50,000 foot view, if you were to look at polio infections from an epidemiological perspective, you could essentially divide it into two stages, the first of which was a rise and fall that coincides with the rise and fall of the use of lead arsenate.

And shortly after World War one, they realized that planes, these things, they had never used before outside of, I suppose, shooting at each other, they realized they could crop dust with them. That was a new commercial application they had never used before. So the spread of lead arsenate as a pesticide exploded and unfortunately coincided with a rise in polio, again, I’m quoting, the paralysis at that time. Eventually, the FDA was created out of mounting concern for the toxicity of lead arsenic, and the FDA came online.

Other government hearings were held, and people complained enough that there started to be some concern that maybe pesticides were being applied to liberally. Maybe there needed to be inspections to see if things were being properly cleaned after they had been sprayed and before the public consumed them. You see another rise, another blip in polio shortly after World War Two, when DDT began to be used. And a lot of people think that the vaccine vanquished polio, because, again, the Salk vaccine, which I would argue doesn’t work, and many other scientists would, came online in 1954 55.

The Sabin vaccine, which actually works despite its, you know, problems, it works, came online in 1961 for one strain of polio. There’s three strains of polio. For those who don’t know, 1963 was when the actual Sabin vaccine, with three that addressed all three types of polio, came online. Polio as an epidemic had been long gone before then. It essentially peaked in 1952 and started to die off well before even the salk vaccine was being used widely.

As I mentioned earlier, the salk vaccine was introduced in 1955 to the nation. There were manufacturing defects which caused it to not be properly killed. The virus did not be properly killed. So it caused a bunch of polio. Is that correct? Yeah, unfortunately, it was a horrible story. I think there are people who suggest that polio is purely a pesticide cause problem. And if there’s anything that would disprove them wrong, it’s the fact that an improperly manufactured vaccine, which I will tell you did not have DDT in it, caused ten or eleven people to die from polio infection.

Because it had the virus in the vaccine, it was improperly inactivated and injected into anyone, it’s going to hit nervous tissue at some point and it’s going to cause problems. If anyone has any doubt that polio was purely a pesticide problem, and the Qatar incident, which is how this whole thing is described, because Qatar was one of the companies manufacturing the vaccine improperly, this incident should disprove that very quickly.

The virus is most definitely capable of causing paralysis and death, as are several other viruses and bacteria. There is no doubt about that. I hope people don’t walk away from this story and think I’m telling you a pesticide story. Yes, pesticides certainly played a part in it, but it is a microbial story. At the end of the day, that’s really what the problem was. Yeah, I mean, what the problem was.

Well, what I get from your book and your hypothesis is that it is a story of complexity and that it has a viral component and a toxicological component, and the terrifying fact of polio and it was a terrifying disease, was the result of the compounding of these two forces. And the idea that the virus is a highly virulent critter once it has invaded your spine, where it would ordinarily have no access, and a critter not worthy of comment when it is in your intestines, fits very well.

The self inflicted part of this is the place to intervene, not destroying your gut such that the viruses that live in it do not find their way into your spine is the obvious remedy. If your hypothesis is correct, and the fact that a virus happens to be present is interesting and an important component of the story, but not where one would rationally focus, but for the history of how the epidemic unfolded.

And I think this is a key lesson here, and it speaks well of your historical approach to the phenomenology here, that by going back and looking at how this unfolded, starting with some moth egg sacs that blew off a kitchen window sill, you do see how it is that people came to partial understandings that resulted in self fulfilling prophecies, etcetera. Anyway, it’s a very powerful way of looking at it that you wouldn’t get if you just simply said, well, what’s the truth of the biology here, the historical context, in order to understand why the biology played out the way it did? Yeah, it is.

Again, from the 50,000 bit view, it is a horrible story and a sequence of mistakes that were made, starting with an invasive species, continuing through a ridiculously toxic pesticide that was applied with wanton disregard for human health all the way through the mistake of believing that somehow all of this was caused by a single virus. Forget the toxological component. The belief that there was only a single virus capable of crossing from your intestines into your neuronal tissue and causing paralysis when in fact there are several and probably more than known now than we did then.

So even then, they recognized that this was a complex problem as you described it. And because the solution was simple and only addressed one thing, we’ve come to believe that polio is a simple story. And unfortunately, it’s a complex story that won’t make it into a 60 minutes episode very well. It’s a sequence of mistakes that compounded upon each other with no true hero at the end. Unfortunately, the vaccine was unnecessary.

And even the Sabin vaccine, which does work against the polio virus itself, was, in the whole scheme of things, wasn’t the hero we thought it was. It was the fact that mothers and fathers eventually realized DDT was far more toxic than they initially believed. And they complained enough that DDT began to, you know, to come to an end in 52 and 53. You can see that I mentioned it in the book.

You can see it in the Life magazine articles you can start going through. And it’s 46 47. Contains DDT. Contains DDT 1952 no DDT 1953 no DDT contained in this product. So you can just track the rise and fall of the popularity of the pesticide just through Life magazine articles. But the historical aspect tells you stories that scientists and historians won’t tell you because there’s truth there. If you just know where to look.

You just have to have enough humility to admit that maybe you were wrong about something you previously thought. All right, so a couple more questions before we wrap this up. One, obviously the moth in the iron lung is your book about poliomyelitis. You’ve got another book, Crooked. You want to describe what that one explores? Sure. Crooked came about through the realization that there were markers on people’s faces that indicated damage from environmental causes that were going unnoticed.

And what began as sort of a curiosity, that people’s smiles were not as straight as they once were and people’s eyes weren’t in perfect alignment like they once were. It turned into sort of a more thorough investigation of the role of metal in medicine in such a way that it led to a couple of hypotheses about the way allergy came to be, about the way autoimmune conditions came to be, and certainly about the way certain neurological conditions, such as autism came to be.

And I didn’t know it at the time, but it was an avenue of research that had been diagnosed and talked about for 200 years. It had sort of fallen into obscurity, occasionally resurrected by some crackpot here and there. And I just happened to feel like I was just the crackpot who needed to write an entire book about it. So there were enough that’s funnies along the way, such as, why do men have a lopsided smile compared to women at the same rate as autism? Why do men smile with the left side low and the right side high compared to men who smile with the left side high, right side low? Why is the ratio of that the same as autism and Asperger’s disease? These sorts of anomalies intrigued me, and I came to write an entire book about what I call man made disease.

And that’s what crooked is. Yeah, man made disease is a good descriptor. Iatrogenic doesn’t cover it. That’s doctor, that’s medicine caused disease. So man made disease, that’s good. And you mentioned that when we had our text chat. You mentioned that this was part of a trilogy, is that right? That’s right. The third book in the series is a working titled the Infection Dilemma. And I want to subtitle it why we kiss.

And it’s the notion. I’ve wondered about this. Yeah, yeah. I think this is evolutionarily speaking, this is why we kiss. Well, I don’t know your hypothesis yet, but I have wondered if it was not a matter of exchanging microbes. Yeah, I’m convinced there is not a. It doesn’t make any sense. Other than creatures, familial creatures with whom you are intimate. I don’t mean that sexually necessarily, but in any way are the people you kiss.

And I believe it’s meant as an exchange, an update, if you will, of the firmware to make sure that immunologically you’re up to date. I mean, this was essentially the problem with the chickenpox vaccine is naturally roaming chickenpox infections worked as a natural booster for varicella in such a way that seniors never had to worry about shingles. Once children started to get a chickenpox vaccine, it crushed the natural boosting effect of natural chickenpox infections, and the elderly lost their immunity to it in such a way that shingles started to come out of the woodwork.

The minute, children started being vaccinated for a chicken pox. Now, wait a minute. I have wondered about this for a very long time, and I hadn’t gotten all that far. My sense was, when I was a kid, presumably when you were a kid, it used to be that children were exposed deliberately to smallpox. When some child had it, other kids were induced to play. Didn’t I say that? You said smallpox, but I know what you meant.

Wow. Oh, what a terrible error. Yes. Okay, maybe. Maybe we were better off with smallpox parties. No, but we had chicken pox parties. I’m going to leave smallpox aside for the moment, but deliberately exposing kids to chickenpox was effectively like vaccinating them or like inoculating textbooks. Yeah, inoculating them. But I always resented the fact that I was exposed to chickenpox as a child because of the risk of shingles later in life.

And my sense was maybe I would have been better off just simply to dodge the virus entirely. But what you’re telling me is that there’s a pattern I don’t know about, where shingles has become an issue in the aftermath of the chickenpox vaccine. That’s right. Yeah. It’s sort of a one to one ratio. Never a problem before. Essentially, when the chickenpox vaccine came out and was introduced into the standard pediatric vaccine schedule.

It does work. In some way, the vaccine does work. Chickenpox is a completely trivial childhood illness with essentially no ill effect other than you get out of school for a day or two. And everybody loved it for that reason. Right. It makes you smarter by keeping you out of school. Well, that’s. That’s. That’s another meta. A whole other meta level. I wasn’t going to go, but yes. So, yeah, within years of.

Of children all being vaccinated for chicken pox, with less naturally roaming chickenpox infections going on, adults weren’t exposed to it in the micro boosting way that they were in the past. This is the theory. Of course. I won’t say this is back. Nope, that’s the hypothesis, but I like it. I’m sorry, the hypothesis. And yes, shingles, I won’t say exploded, but within years, shingles incidences rose such that science came to the rescue with a shingles vaccine, essentially the result of a chicken box vaccine.

So it’s a win win for pharma. Well, I don’t know. Of course, having not looked into the pattern of emergence, I don’t know if what you’re reporting is accurate, though I’m impressed with a lot of the research you’ve done, so I would imagine it probably is right. But if that’s right, that’s a very conspicuous pattern, and it would answer a longstanding question for me. All right, if I might ask you one last question here, and it’s sort of a delicate one, I hope you will take it in the spirit in which I ask it.

I don’t know how to ask it, really, just. Are you an. Are you an anti vaxxer? Were you always one? If you are one now, and if not, how did you become one? Yeah, I can. You’re not offending me. I can answer that question easily. I’m afraid of offending you with the answer. But given that we’re both adults here and separated by thousands of miles, I’ll go ahead and tell you the truth.

You’d be safe even if you were sitting in the same room. It’s like they say, never walk. Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. That way, you’re a mile away. And also, you have issues and. Yeah, you have issues. Exactly. That’s a car talk. That’s a car talk. Quit. I started completely with complete belief that vaccines were the most important medical discovery of all time.

More than antibiotics, more than surgery. The two others you mentioned, I was as convinced as anyone was. I slowly made the descent into madness to where you now find me. The journey, I’ll sum it up in 60 seconds. The journey was, well, maybe the polio vaccine actually wasn’t as necessary as we thought. Maybe we could have solved the problem with doing away with rampant pesticide use. I got to.

Well, actually, the polio vaccine was completely unnecessary. But the others are necessary. The others? These diseases were horrible. Through additional research and understanding that the measles infection was an innocuous infection that no one ever died from, with proper levels of nutrition, vitamin A in particular. I started to think, well, why was a measles vaccine invented? No one was dying of it in the United States. It wasn’t a rampant, terrible disease.

Why did they do it? Well, it was because they could. It was because they thought they could eradicate the disease with a vaccine. And if you study measles, you will understand. It started with the promise of eradication. You know, everyone gets the vaccine. Within two or three years, it’ll be eradicated, and on and on it goes till the point it’s not eradicated. So I transitioned into the, well, maybe there are some vaccines that are useful and others that really, you don’t need.

I then made the jump to what I call a first world anti vaxxer, which is, well, we need vaccines in the third world. They don’t have the medical care or nutrition that we might have here. So, sure, maybe a couple of hippies in California can afford to skip it, but if everyone skipped it, and then especially in the third world, no, you know, we have to do that.

We’ll lose herd immunity. I then realized herd immunity was a falsity in, in the case of several vaccines. And I’m beginning to wonder if it’s completely false for all vaccines. You will know this, certainly with all the COVID vaccine research you’ve done, the notion of herd immunity is false for the COVID vaccine. It doesn’t prevent its spread. Several other vaccines are certainly incapable of preventing its spread, and some of them, in fact, encourage its spread, such as the oral polio vaccine that Bill Gates administers en masse all across countries throughout the world.

So I am now at the point. I apologize, dear friend. I am at the point where I believe vaccines are completely unnecessary, even in the third world. I’m sure you’ve heard Bobby Kennedy mentioned the doctor Peter Aaby study in Africa, where they followed a large cohort of children who had gotten the DTaP vaccine and those who hadn’t. And the mortality rate of those who had gotten the vaccine was ten times higher.

Doctor Peter Aaby is considered the godfather of vaccination in Africa. So for him to admit this in a paper, you have to understand that this is a significant event. I’m now at the point where I am so opposed to vaccination. I, if I had the power, would ban all of them. I would outlaw every single one. I don’t think any of them are worth it. I think the costs, the risks from neurological illness, from autoimmunity, from even allergy itself, all three things that never existed before the widespread advent of mass vaccination.

I think the damage they have caused is so severe that one day they will be completely banned from humanity. Now, again, I apologize. I didn’t start that way. I wasn’t crazy. Always. Through a lot of research, I’ve come to that point. Well, okay, let me say a few things in that context. One, what Heather and I have encountered with respect to COVID has put us in a very awkward situation with many people who would otherwise have no problem with us.

And I’ve started when I, when people say, oh, you know, what’s your podcast about that kind of thing? I’ve started saying that Heather and I are terrible people who’ve come to believe unforgivable things. And I say that because it skips a dozen steps in the process of discovery, and it alerts people that I am aware that what I am saying will come across in a particular way. And yet I am there because I think it’s the right conclusion.

We can skip all the part where you tell me I don’t understand what’s going on. The answer is yes. I’ve considered that possibility, and yet here I am. And it sounds to me like you have a version of this yourself. I also my children are. I don’t know anything about your family history, but my children are fully vaccinated up to the point where COVID happened. None of us got the COVID vaccines, or so called vaccines.

And if I had it to do over again, I would think very carefully about each and every one of the vaccines they got, because I am aware that many of the stories that we are told are at least wildly incomplete. I did not know what an adjuvant was until beginning to dig into this, and I am now spooked at anything that depends on that mechanism. It does not strike me as a biologically sound mechanism to induce immunity, even if the vaccine works, the consequence of the irritants that are used to induce the immune system to overreact to an otherwise weak antigen, that’s not a reasonable thing to do.

And if you were going to do it, it should come with some sort of a warning about what other things you might want to avoid while your immune system was in this hyperactive state. I also know from the portion of your book crooked that I have already read, that the effect of the antigens does not anticipate the duration that they did. I say antigens, adjuvants, adjuvants. The longevity of the adjuvants in one system far exceeds what they lead us to believe when telling us how safe and effective these vaccines that they want to give us are.

So in any case, I am of two beliefs. One, the mechanism that we are using to produce vaccines is not trustworthy. And in that context, what the net effect of the vaccine schedule is is deeply in doubt. And with respect to each of the component vaccines, I think extreme caution is warranted. That is not the same thing as saying that. I’m not a believer in principle in the idea of vaccination, and that a proper system might not produce vaccines that were worth the cost.

I don’t know that it would, but I am certainly open to the possibility that there would be vaccines worth having or circumstances in which it would be worth contemplating that mechanism. But we don’t live in that world, and that puts me in a very awkward spot. It’s possible that the entire story of vaccination is incorrect. It’s also possible that the basic story of vaccination is correct. But the business model surrounding the production of these things is so horrifying that it results in us inflicting harm on innocent people who deserve to be protected for no justification whatsoever.

So, in any case, I know that’s complex. I don’t wish to overcomplicate this, but I do think we have to leave open the possibility that even if there’s a tremendous amount of harm being done by modern vaccines, that that’s not an indictment of the principle. Of course not in principle. I wish, you know, from my perspective, I wished they worked. I wished they were safer than they are, apparently.

I wish they worked more effectively than they do. I wish they didn’t depend on adjuvants to achieve any sort of effect. But unfortunately, it’s a cheat that I think Mother Nature detects, and you won’t win that battle. I think, in my opinion, natural immunity is unfortunately the only way. I think the human body properly nourished in a stress free environment, which isn’t always possible, but the human body is perfectly capable of dealing with infection and in fact, thrives through it.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the notion of telling you, new parent, your child must receive steroid injections so they don’t have to go outside and exercise is so patently absurd, yet we do the exact same thing with infection. And that’s the subject of the infection dilemma, the book I was mentioning, the third book of the trilogy, which is to suppose that infection is not uniformly evil, and in fact, it is a necessary requirement for robust health.

And to try and cheat your way through it any other way is asking for trouble. Well, it’s funny, George Carlin nailed this one. I won’t try to recreate his line, but his basic point was he was so healthy because he spent so much time swimming in the Hudson river, basically in filth, and it made his immune system robust. But I will point out that one thing that I have become increasingly suspicious of, and in fact, I was gratified to see you call it out in your book and to add some detail to what I understood, is that there’s a difference between the technology of vaccination and inoculation with a syringe or with a hypodermic needle, is really what I mean.

I used to think a hypodermic needle was an elegant intervention that did minimal harm to deliver something very potent and therapeutic. I now think that the breaching of the skin with a hypodermic needle is a hypernovel event, and that the difference, for example, between. Well, back in the day, when I was more of a believer in the currently available vaccines, I never thought they were safe. I didn’t think that that was possible, but I thought they were, on balance, worth it and well tested, which I now no longer believe.

But we used to be told, is there mercury in this vaccine? Yes, but it’s less than you would get in a tuna fish sandwich. Well, a, there shouldn’t be any mercury in a tuna fish sandwich. That’s a human screw up to begin with, and nobody says it’s safe. And in fact, pregnant women are told to limit their intake of that because we know it isn’t safe. But the other thing is, it’s a false analogy.

The quantity of mercury injected into you versus that same quantity ingested has a radically different implication for where that mercury ends up. And because of active transport, basically because it’s not good for you to eat mercury, but the fact that you don’t have a history transporting it actively across the gut means that it is effectively outside your body. Your alimentary canal is topologically outside of your body. That’s very different than injecting it into your muscle or subdermally.

In any case, I have come to understand that I had the hypodermic needle exactly wrong. It is a radical intervention capable of creating disease to which you would otherwise be immune by breaching barriers in a way that nature does not anticipate. And so, anyway, I guess I discovered through your book that the invention of the hypodermic needle is much later than I had expected, which, of course, if I had thought carefully about it, I would have realized, because the refinement necessary to get a needle that would be useful in that regard is late emerging.

Yeah, well, if you continue to read crooked, which I partly hope you will and partly apologize for you having done it, you will see that the notion that the dose makes the poison is also, in fact, incorrect, especially when it comes to aluminum adjuvant. There was always the notion that there were only microscopic amounts of adjuvant in the vaccine, and they can’t possibly be enough to harm. But one of the main hypotheses of the crooked book is suggesting otherwise.

That, in fact, when large doses of aluminum adjuvant are injected into your body, your body forms protective nodules around the adjuvant, it forms these granules that you can actually feel under your skin. When it’s in microscopic amounts, your body doesn’t respond so aggressively and it escapes into your bloodstream. And there’s another component of that which is even more nefarious. I won’t go into right now, but the reason why I believe aluminum adjuvant in vaccines is probably one of the most heinous crimes against humanity we’ve ever committed.

But it’s an interesting book. And one more thing. You know, I mentioned the autism vaccine. Another book, I think I sent you a copy, that is a story of aluminum adjuvant. If you are enjoying or horrified at reading about adjuvants, that goes into great detail about the history and invention of adjuvant and why they had to use it. So I do recommend you give that book a shot when you get a minute.

Excellent. Your point about the dose not necessarily making the poison reminds me of the basic lesson, I think, of this whole podcast and of much of your work is welcome to complex systems, because we have simple rules for complicated systems like chemistry. Right. In chemistry, the temperature increases the rate of reaction once you get into biology, biochemistry. That’s not true anymore. It’s true to a point. And then there’s a point at which heat disrupts the enzymes that are facilitating the reaction.

I see. And so the point is, a simple rule that you learn in a complicated system and then you apply in a complex system can get you into huge danger because you think it still applies. And something has changed that you weren’t alerted to. So I think someday we will understand that a huge fraction of disease is the result of this one simple error. It’s a complex system, and we are still very new to complex systems in terms of understanding them.

So our basic approach ought to be disrupt them as little as possible. The closer you can get to putting the creature in an environment that looks like its ancestral environment, and an adult environment that looks like the childhood environment, the healthier the creature is going to be. And every time you do something, even things that you dont think should make a difference, like glazed windows or a light switch, that that causes a bulb in your room to put out exactly the photons you need to get your work done, these things seem, how could that possibly be harmful? But once you come to understand our relationship with different wavelengths of light, you realize that these are both rather like the hypodermic needle, much more radical in their departure from the analog that your ancestors knew than they seemed.

They seem minimal. They are in fact, radical and human health hangs in the balance. I have a pet hypothesis that sunglasses are causing the rise in skin cancer incidents and that your eyes are your body’s natural modulator for melatonin production, and that going out in full sun with sunglasses on prevents your body from reacting to what it should naturally do, which is to increase melatonin production. So I’ve.

I’ve stopped wearing sunglasses again, something that seems like a natural, fine, innocuous thing, but I have a feeling it may be impacting us. I think that’s. I think this is a perfect. A perfect analog for our relative position here. I find you utterly extreme in your opposition to sunglasses because driving requires them sometimes. But other than that, you’re probably right about them. And I have wondered this, too, that it does not seem like, well, consider driving without sunglasses.

Going to the gym, your eyes will adjust. You know, they get better. The muscles that contract your pupils get better with time, and it’s not such a pain because it hurt at it. But I’m a real hardcore enthusiast now and I could stare directly at the eclipse and it won’t hurt a thing. My children have gone skiing for the day and I scolded my younger son because he was heading out on this journey without sunglasses for driving.

But I will tell you, nowhere in my mind was it necessary for him to have them just because he was driving and it was sunny out. It’s for that very rare circumstance where you’re driving, you know, where the sun is setting right over the highway and you’re squinting and it’s making it impossible to see whether there are other cars. I have no doubt you can get better at it, but I still think you need to have them in the car, even if you’re right that in general you shouldn’t be wearing them.

Yeah, maybe so. But I like the eskimo bone sunglasses, the ones with the little slits on them that they were the sunglasses. Those are so cool. I can’t. I can’t believe they haven’t made it into a dune movie yet. I can’t believe a production artist somewhere hasn’t said, we need the eskimo bone glasses. For some of our neurons. We need the eskimo bone glasses is exactly right. Yeah.

And I agree, they are super cool. And they do suggest, actually, another factor here, which I was going to mention because my kids are skiing and they’re going to wear their sunglass goggles, that the snow changes this, too, because you can damage your retina with reflection off the snow and the fact that Inuits used those bone glasses suggest that although that was their native habitat, that because their ancestry did not involve living on the ice, that a technological intervention was presumably positive for them.

That’s right. And it does make you wonder about the eye shape of those people which have that. I can’t remember what the name is called, the cantle tilt or whatever. You know, if that was a. An adaptation for living on snow, because that’s essential. Yeah, that’s a good question, but, yeah. Well, here’s to your sunglasses. I raise you a toast. I enjoyed, I enjoyed the eclipse sunglass free.

But I did have an incredible headache the next day, so maybe I’m not as robust as I’m making myself out to be. Yeah. None of us are. All right. Well, Forest Moretti, and I know I’ve pronounced it correctly. Yeah. It’s. It’s been a pleasure. I do recommend that. I would recommend people start with the moth and the iron lung. Yeah. It is not too. It’s a great read, and it’s such a perfect example of what complex systems will do to your complicated thinking.

It’s beautifully researched. And I would also point out it is available as an audiobook. It’s very enjoyable as an audiobook. So you can listen to it while you’re driving around with your sunglasses nearby but not on. Thank you. Yeah. Anyway, so thanks for joining me. And to everybody else, thanks for listening. .

See more of Jim Fetzer on their Public Channel and the MPN Jim Fetzer channel.