The Longevity Secret Hiding In Plain Sight

TITLE: The longevity secret hiding in plain sight CHANNEL: Viva Longevity! DATE: 2026-04-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I made two really bold claims in my last episode. The first was that I believe the number one predictor after poverty of a population’s health is trust in science. The second bold claim came down this way. This is a longevity channel, so I’ll be struck by lightning if I don’t mention how profoundly vaccinations affect longevity. I’m not aware that vaccines have anything to do with autism, but there is very convincing evidence that they significantly reduce our risk of Alzheimer’s. We even have a couple of probable mechanisms such as reducing inflammation caused by disease. I’ll make an episode on vaccines and longevity, so subscribe if you want to see those fireworks. That episode was mostly about nutrition, but with the mention of vaccines, it generated about 1,500 comments in the first few days. Since vaccines are so emotional, let’s start with the most important comment first. I get bad vibes from watching your videos, all of them. You have a know-it-all persona, and it’s not attractive. That comment got me watching Heidi Larson’s TED Talk. She’s an anthropologist and founding director of the vaccine confidence project at the London School of Hygiene. She is arguably the world’s leading expert on why people reject vaccines.

Big business makes vaccines and neither institution, government, or big business are high in the trust ranks these days. And then there’s scientists who discover and develop vaccines. and they’re pretty elite and not accessible to the general public, at least the language they speak. I resemble that remark. People are asking all kinds of questions. They’re asking, “What’s the wisdom of so many vaccines? What about all those ingredients and preservatives?” These are not crazy people. They’re not uneducated. They’re actually worried mothers. But some of them have come to me and say, “We feel ignored. We feel judged if we ask a question. And we even feel demonized. That maybe we’re part of some antivaccine group.” Understanding the emotional reasons why people believe what they do is way above my pay grade. I have read a couple of books like Michael Sherman’s and Daniel Conormans that claim we evolve to be emotional pattern matchers, not statisticians. If a parent’s child gets diagnosed with autism not long after receiving vaccines, the thing we’re evolved to do is believe the vaccines cause the autism. I’m here with Jenny McCarthy, who’s become one of the most vocal advocates for parents of children with autism. Famously, when Oprah read a statement from the CDC saying they didn’t have evidence of a link between vaccines and autism, Jenny replied, “My science is heaven and he’s at home. That’s my science. Evan is Jenny’s son who was diagnosed with autism. There is a landmark paper on the backfire effect showing that presenting facts to the contrary often has the opposite effect of what scientists thought the data would do. It doesn’t lessen their belief, it hardens it. That seems to be what happened with Jenny. Scientists were unprepared for this tsunami of doubt and questions and distrust. But my comfort zone is with the data. Let’s see if I can explain it and do more good than harm because I also got comments like this. I would love a video about vaccines and longevity. I’ve got a few family members who’ve been sucked into the antivaccination social media machine and now think vaccines are bad and I don’t even know how to talk to them when the subject comes up. There are at least six different groups with different beliefs about vaccines. And at least three are among the very best of us, but they all find it incredibly hard to understand each other because they come at this from very different perspectives. They remind me of this famous parable. Six blindfolded men touch an elephant. Each one touches a different part of the elephant and comes to a conclusion. This must be a tree. This is a rope. It’s obviously a stick. You’re both wrong. It’s a snake. You’re all idiots. It’s obviously a wall. Except we are not blind. But the elephant in the room, vaccines are mysterious and scary. But I may be able to give some insight on what makes each group tick. I’ll do that later in the episode. And that brings up the next important comment. Exalted Fox said, “hm, I love the channel, but sometimes your own bias gets you. Science, in quotes, is a loaded term, and you should be very cautious about the vaccine debate. I find it completely laughable that you say vaccines reduce Alzheimer’s since the number of vaccines has exploded since the 80s and Alzheimer’s keeps rising.” And this is why I think it’s so important that we hear from epidemiologists. My professors at grad school used to tell us, “Concent concentrate on the landmark studies and thoroughly understand them. Most of the rest is noise.” We are all so very lucky to live in an age with recent landmark studies like this one. The neurologist Paul Schultz at University of Houston, who has a great reputation, led this study on flu vaccines versus Alzheimer’s. Heidi Larson just told us in her TED talk that scientists use elite language the public can’t relate to. So, I’ll try to explain this study with a fascinating story I think almost everyone can relate to. When I was in tech, the search engine wars were fought and won by companies like Yahoo, Excite, and WebCrawler, which America Online bought. I knew the heads of search of all three of those companies well. Late to the party came two guys who tried to sell their search engine to the search companies but got no takers. So they rented a garage and started Google. They had the idea that the most popular internet pages had the most links to them. And you could tell a lot about the character of those pages by who linked to them. They got that idea from reading scientific papers because that’s exactly how it works with scientific papers and the references at the bottom. But unlike search engines of the day, they hired scientists that were basically epidemiologists by a different name. And they figured out signals that could give them a clue about whether searchers like the results of their search. For example, when they clicked on a link, how long did they stay? They called that dwell time. The more data they collected about signals like that and on more people, the better they could predict what you were looking for. And using that science, they crushed every other company. Epidemiology is just like that. You may be thinking, “But wait, don’t old people prefer different search results than young people?” People in the UK may prefer different results than someone in New York. You can imagine how that applies to so many things like religion, politics, occupation, and education. Now, you may be wondering, how many math nerds did they hire? And how big are their computers? Well, famously, they hired thousands of PhD nerds. Many of them are friends and neighbors. One math cheat they use is called propensity matching. I’m in Bali and I just searched for the Sage restaurant. They know my location from my internet connection and they know the propensity of people in Bali who search for a restaurant in that name is the one they have here. And now you know everything you need to know to understand this study from the University of Texas. The team included 12 researchers, three of them big data math nerd and one an epidemiologist. They tapped into an incredibly detailed independent database and picked out almost a million senior adults who do not get flu vaccines and they were able to propensity match them with people who do. same sex, age, geographical area, etc. Look at the positively mindblowing number of chronic conditions where they found a close propensity match between a nonvaccinated and vaccinated person. You have more than a million chances of finding a person who is a close propensity match. They only studied people for whom they could find a propensity match that close. Compare that level of detail to any story you’ve ever heard in a comment section. Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing stories about someone’s grandfather who was sharp at 90 despite his love for whiskey and cigars. But comparing those stories to a study like this is like comparing Yahoo’s search results to Google’s back in the day. Let’s hear directly from Dr. Schultz about how this worked and the results. What we showed is that three annual influenza vaccines reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s about 20% as far as we can tell and six annual ones reduces it about 40%. We’ve looked at four 6 and 8 years and it it it’s it’s present in all of them which is way longer than the vaccine lasts against the flu. I don’t know what the ultimate end is, but it it means, you know, in real terms, like I was showing earlier this week, if you’ve got, you know, 900,000 people vaccinated, 900,000, not 80,000 get Alzheimer’s in one group and only 50,000 in the other. That’s 30,000 people that did not get Alzheimer’s disease. That’s just astounding. And what a the disease is so awful for people that have it and for their loved ones watching their loved one disappear one brain cell at a time. Yeah, that 30,000 fewer people walking around just from the one cohort we were looking at. What an impact on people’s lives there. Later in this episode, you’ll meet one of the data scientists who made this study possible. She’s wonderful, and I don’t think Dr. Schultz would ever be able to have confidence in numbers like that without data science people like her. You may wonder, does Dr. Schultz have any industry ties? I wondered, and indeed he does. My first reaction was to face balm. The good news is he does have endowed professorships from quality foundations. Those are considered a good sign. He also has NIH funding also considered solid. But he consults with Eli Liy Biogen and Aadia Pharmaceuticals. H I investigated. But it’s kind of an amazing plot twist. Those companies don’t sell flu vaccines, but they do sell very expensive Alzheimer’s drugs. So publishing a paper showing that cheap flu vaccines reduce the need for Alzheimer’s drugs and may even be more effective is against their financial interest not for it. I take back my face palm. If this was one study, one vaccine, one disease, that would be well one thing. But Paul’s team have completed studies on the TEDAP vaccine which stands for tetanus dtheria and pertasus and on pneumonia and shingles. They all produce similar results. And as for more studies, an incredibly good Stanford team noticed that in Wales, people born before a certain date were ineligible for the shingles vaccine. And just like that, populations who were born just a few weeks after that magical date and received the shingles vaccine had a 20% lower incidence of dementia. Since a population born in the same area just a few weeks apart are similar in every way, it isolated the effects of just the vaccine. The studies are coming fast and furious now. Just last week, Dr. Robert Nuin at UC Riverside made a presentation at the American College of Cardiology. His team used a patient record database called TRetics and you’re probably in it. That’s because 117 million Americans are since they consolidate medical records from over 170 healthcare organizations. One advantage of this database is it has fields for social determinants of health, including income, housing, education, and problems related to employment. Dr. Nuin was able to collect records for 247,000 patients who had a diagnosis for at least partial clogged arteries. Half of them were vaccinated with the shingles vaccine and half were not. They selected those 247,000 records because they could find a close proximity match, an unvaccinated person with a vaccinated one. And the results were shocking. In just the first year after receiving the vaccine, they saw a 46% reduction in heart attacks and strokes and 66% reduction in all cause mortality. There is no medication that can provide numbers like that. And the hits keep coming. Also, last week, our friends from University of Texas at Houston used a different database to track people over 65 who got the higher dose version of the flu vaccine. And people who got that dose got a 54% reduction in Alzheimer’s incidents over the next 3 years. That’s insane. But wait, I used the term longevity in the beginning of the episode, not just reduction in Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Two months ago, two researchers from USC’s respected School of Gerontology published a paper about that. They tapped into medical records of 4,000 retired seniors over 70. What’s unique is they had frozen blood samples so they could test seven different markers of aging from the blood tests like inflammatory markers and biologic age. Here is one of the researchers, Eene Crims, talking about that. We have been collecting data on humans now for more than 30, 40 years. We have lots of uh samples in freezers that we’re now taking out and we’re able to measure many of these things that weren’t even identified when the samples were collected. And they found that on average, the blood tests of people who got the shingles vaccine had 19% lower markers of aging than people who didn’t get the vaccine. That actually only translates to about an extra year and a half for most people in America. And that is because our life expectancy is 79 and 19% of those extra 9 years is roughly a year and a half. But in my zip code, sandwiched between Google, Apple, and Stanford, the life expectancy is 85. same as Japan’s. I think that’s because our industry is science and so trust in science is very high in this area. For example, our COVID booster rate is about 2 and a half times the national average. So 19% slower aging for people in my area translates to almost 3 years of extra life. I’ll take it because I have so many risk factors. 23 and me says, “I have two copies of the APOE4 gene, which means a very high risk of Alzheimer’s. I had a concussion so bad the blow fractured my skull and I had to be lifellighted to Stanford in a helicopter. More risk of dementia, but three added years of seeing your grandkids grow up for the price of a shingles vaccine. I’ll take that. But I can feel some of you saying, “How is this relevant to me? I’m a 20some. I’m going to bail, old man, and focus on my dance moves. Eileen had a lot to say about that. Well, not about the dance moves. One of the most interesting findings of your research though has been uh the extent to which some of these aging processes may occur in childhood. We have always taught in the school of gerontology that aging begins not at birth but before birth in your grandmother’s ovaries. Things that happen extremely early in life and maybe even to the generation before can actually have long-term effects for you. I’m an example. I had rheumatic fever as a child, which permanently damaged my heart. It’s more easily preventable now than it was back then. I’m not getting encouraging signals from my doctors about what this means for my future. When I first came to USC, I said that I um was interested in mortality change in this u amazing increase in life expectancy among older people. I worked with a biologist here, Caleb Finch. He and I looked at a lot of data from a lot of countries and what we really decided was that a lot of what the current decline in mortality among old people was resulting from was from their early life changes when they were children. that what happened over time is that these cohorts gradually had less and less exposure to infectious disease and their bodies essentially grew stronger and better. And as they and also probably their brains and minds and as they got to old age, they were better equipped for the then aging process. So they had stronger bodies. You may wonder who figured out that vaccines could be good at preventing diseases that they weren’t designed to prevent. Interestingly, it came from two Dutch angels working with children in Africa. I’m a medical doctor and a researcher. And for the past 25 years, I’ve been working in the small West African country, Guinea Bisau. In Guinea Bisau, we have a field station where we follow 200,000 people with regular home visits. And we register all deliveries, all vaccinations, all hospitalizations, health center visits, all child deaths. And with this information, we started doing what nobody else had done before us. We evaluated the effect of vaccines on overall health. This may come as a surprise, but normally vaccines are not assessed for their effects on overall health. Data mining for the win. She is both a medical doctor and a PhD epidemiologist. And here I am at the maternity ward together with the nurse Gina. In the crib in front of us lies a little baby girl. She was born the previous evening. I know for you to relate to her, it would be better if I could tell you her name, but she hasn’t got a name yet. Mothers in Guinea Bisau do not name their children until later. They know there’s a high risk they will die. In this video, the little girl gets a live polio vaccine. A few drops of weakened polio virus in the mouth. According to the current understanding of vaccines, this should should do nothing to her risk of surviving or dying because there’s no polio in Guinea Bisau. But our research has shown that this vaccine will train her immune system and make her so strong that she can combat all kind of different diseases and this will significantly reduce her risk of dying. When you are born, your immune system is a beginner when it comes to battling infections. It’s like somebody who enters the tennis court for the first time and has to learn how to play tennis. and a real infection. It’s a really skilled opponent which may beat the hell out of you and even send you off the court of life. A couple years ago, Tony and I wanted to enter Uganda and they required a yellow fever vaccine. So, we went to Walgreens to get the jab and they said, “Oh, that’s a live vaccine and it mounts a really big response. You get the 7-day yellow fever hangover. Better check with your doc to see if you can handle it now that you’re over 70.” There is a towering figure at Stanford, Dr. Pelindrum, who’s unraveling the biochemistry of how a vaccine intended for one disease can boost immunity for another. For us, the journey began about 2008 when we did this experiment in human immunology by using yellow fever. Yellow fever is a live virus vaccine. It was made some 80 years ago and it’s incredibly potent at stimulating long-lasting immune responses. The efficacy is 99%. Nobody really knew how it works. So we thought that this would be a terrific model to begin to understand the immunology. And what we did is shown here in the slide where we vaccinated healthy humans, collected blood samples at all those time points shown there and then did a deep profiling of the innate and the adaptive response to vaccination. I’ll spare you the biochemistry because I can’t understand it either. Maybe Physionic can explain it on his channel. But the powerful immune boost from yellow fever made for a really good joke for our 30 days in Bali. There were nine of us, six kids, one family doctor, and one mom with a degree in biochemistry. I won’t mention names, but eight of us got sick multiple times from things like Bali Belly. So, the countdown was on for when the old guy would finally join the ranks. I would joke that whenever some bug tried to bring me down, my yellow fever vaccine would go into hyperdrive and save me. But trust in science in my area is not blind. We’re very aware of how money corrupts. One of my filters is to discount any industry funded study. They go into my spam filter and they don’t come out. The studies I’ve showed so far are from university data miners, not pharma companies and not funded by industry. I don’t think anyone expected to see the dramatic results we’re seeing published in the last few weeks. And I don’t see how we would know any of this without the data scientists. This seems like a real triumph of the nerds moment. So, I mentioned early on that I think I do have some insights to share about the way different groups come to their beliefs about vaccines. Let’s start with concerned mothers. You may have heard of the 18-year-old who went viral by posting on Reddit that he’s the child of a vaccine hesitant mom. When he turned 18, he wanted to make his own decision. So, he asked for advice on where to get vaccines. Here he is. When I encountered this and I talked to my mom, it, you know, didn’t obviously go well at first cuz I was wanting to do something that she thought would either cause autism or uh maim me for the rest of my life. And I said I wanted to do this. Didn’t really fly. I saw Ethan speak at a conference, the Global Vaccine Summit. He said, ‘You know, everybody talks about misinformation, but I want to tell you about a different kind of misinformation. And that’s misinformation that says that people like my mother who is a loving mother is a bad person because she doesn’t give me vaccines. Well, I want to tell all of you that she didn’t give me a vaccine because she loves me and because she believed that that was the best thing for me. I think differently and I will never change her mind, but she’s not a bad person. Consider the unbelievably emotional and conflicting advice a mom hears about vaccines in America. Trust in many sciences like vaccines is now very low. Here’s an example. 250,000 mostly young mothers watched this episode with Megan Kelly. But even before all the controversies surrounding the COVID vaccine, parents were becoming concerned about Gardil. Gardil is the HPV vaccination to prevent cervical cancer among many other cancers later in life. It is controversial in America. It is something my friends and I have discussed at length. My core friend group in New York, we all made friends when our daughters were two and in preschool together. And now they’re all 11, 12, right around there. And we are all being asked to make this decision for our kids. I’ve got a 13-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, and I haven’t gotten this vaccine for them yet, but I’ve been told by the pediatrician I should. So, what’s the story? Do we do we just trust a pediatrician who says that to us or do we have to do our own research because those same pediatricians told us to get the COVID vaccine for our kids? And now I’m very glad I didn’t. We have both sides well represented for this discussion. Dr. Kristen Walsh is a boardcertified pediatrician in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard. She’s been practicing for over 20 years. Dr. Walsh is the mother of twin teenagers and she believes parents should get the vaccine for their kids. Also with us today, Allison Krug. Allison is an epidemiologist who earned her master’s degree in public health from the University of Virginia. Okay, but if you have a background in epidemiology, sirens are going off and red flags are popping up. A master’s in public health gets you a few basic epidemiology classes. Consider the difference in qualifications here. Dr. Walsh went to medical school, did a residency, became boardcertified, and has spent 20 years on the front line caring for children. Epidemiologists, who I referenced earlier, went on to get their PhDs and then spent another three years as post-doal students and then accumulated some years of experience working as actual researchers. And the word epidemiology is very broad like surgeon. What kind of surgeon? An eye surgeon is very different from a kidney surgeon. You would never ask your eye surgeon to perform a kidney transplant. But very few people watching this show would know any of this because we get so little exposure to epidemiologists. We interface with doctors all the time and understand what they do. But when has anyone ever taken their child for a consultation with an epidemiologist? I’ve spent over 100 hours on this and I’ve really only scratched the surface I believe um in beginning to understand my clear position on this. 100 hours of a literature review, two and a half weeks. Wouldn’t we all have loved to see an epidemiologist with the same level of training and experience as Dr. Walsh and specifically with Gardil. There are a lot of epidemiologists who study Gardicil vaccination programs all around the world. For example, Australia has been vaccinating 12 and 13year-old girls in school since 2007. The rate of cervical cancer has dropped in half there since then and their goal is to eradicate it by 2035. The side effects that they are talking about for this vaccine um beyond what the CDC acknowledges, which is anaphilaxis, which is 26 per million. That’s true. The CDC acknowledges three per million, not 26. Could they be covering something up? Other countries acknowledge about the same or even less than the CDC. There is one report that lists the 26 million that Allison quotes. It’s from 2008, the first year of the Australian rollout, and only in New South Wales in Australia. It’s never been replicated. Those cases were thoroughly investigated, but the thing is it was a small number of cases. Skin prick tests showed no signs of allergies in some of the cases which means they were probably just fainting and all the cases were managed without any drama. As the program stabilized in subsequent years that number went away. Syncopy which is fainting is 82 per million. CDC admits in its own studies that those are much higher than other vaccines. Right on the CDC’s website they say the only adverse rate higher than expected from other vaccines is fainting. But instead of scaring mothers with numbers out of context, let’s put them in context. The anaphilaxis rate is 10 times higher from bees than gardicil and 100 times higher from food. But the context is critical because gardicil is given in a controlled environment where medical staff are present. So there has never been a death in Australia from anaphilaxis after 15 million gardicil jabs. And yes, 12 and 13year-old girls faint at higher rates than young children and adults. Tony’s wonderful niece faints at the sight of a needle before the jab. Good thing she has a great sense of humor about it. The focus of all epidemiologists is outcomes, but the moms who watch this episode didn’t get to hear about them. So, here are outcomes right here in America. Massachusetts has achieved 80% gardicil vaccination rate whereas Mississippi is at half that. But Mississippi has three times the cervical cancer rate and life expectancy is 7 years longer in Massachusetts. That’s the kind of outcome data every epidemiologist involved with Gartisel would know. This vaccine also benefits boys because they suffer cancers from HPV, too. Imagine you’re a mom watching this for 90 minutes, wanting to do the right thing for your kids and having the episode and this way. 30 seconds closing argument on on your positions. I have long experience giving this vaccine. I’ve really reviewed all the safety data and I still think in terms of risks and benefits, it is a home run. I I gave it to my two boys. Now, I think possibly I could justify one dose. So, I’m I wouldn’t say I’m all the way on the other side of the continuum, but I am much more circumspect. Um, my co-author in the Epoch Times, Dr. Yu Hong Dong, feels very strongly she’s an MD/PhD. She feels very strongly that it’s a hard no on any doses. Any doses. Yeah. Okay. That is the first time Yuan Dong’s name was mentioned in the episode, and I’m not sure anyone would recognize that name. But if they did, they’d discover her articles are about a string of horrifying and what she calls undeniable outcomes after receiving the Gardicil vaccine, paralysis, and even death. Every epidemiologist would know those horrifying deaths occur at the same rate as children who get the vaccine as those who don’t. But very few moms would know that because the only way you would know is through data science and very few people have a background in that. I can’t recall ever seeing a data scientist like you’ll meet in a few minutes on a show like Megan’s. And doctors are not data scientists, so even many of them don’t know. I think it’s so important to understand how most parents react when a tragedy befalls their child because we have evolved to react this way. It’s in our genes. Maybe the most famous viologist in the world is Paul Offett and his wife is a pediatrician. I asked him about this. So my wife came in on a weekend and was helping the nurse give vaccines. A four-month-old was sitting on her mother’s lap. And while my wife was drawing the vaccine up into the syringe, the four-month-old had a seizure and went on to have a permanent seizure disorder and was dead at age five of a chronic neurological condition. I think if my wife had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, the mother would have been convinced that the vaccine had caused it, right? I mean, here my child gets a vaccine, five minutes later has a problem, now goes on to have a lifelong problem which ends up being fatal. I know what happened. I’m not stupid. I saw what happened. So, I mean, it’s hard. I It’s because we’re compelled by uh events that occur in proximity um even though they would be a coincidence but not a causal relationship. And it’s an emotional experience. And I think it’s uneasy to see how people can can understand that they’re passionately uh they passionately love their child. They see something bad happen. We all are sort of causal seeking organisms. We’re right. We’re trying to find what because we want to prevent it the next time and now we think we’ve we found it. And so we’re not going to only not give vaccines to our own children. we’re going to give not try and make sure other people don’t give vaccines to their children because we’re convinced they’re harmful or have caused a problem when often they aren’t. But it’s we’re human. To Megan’s credit, she does understand this and she made it clear in her episode. It is indisputable that there have been a small number of children or young people who have died within days to weeks of receiving these this vaccine. The cases that have been investigated, they were not shown to be related. So, you know, you and I both know that a train can go by at noon, but the train didn’t make me hungry for lunch. I got Lasix on my eyes. I was talking to the doctor about how if anything were to happen to my eyes, let’s say in May or June or July, I was I knew I was going to be blaming the Lasix. And he said, “That’s a risk doctors think about all the time. It’s like whatever bad happens to this patient within X time from the surgery or whatever the pre procedure is, I’m gonna get blamed.” And that seems like a very good segue to understanding medical professionals because I think that along with loving mothers, they are the best of us. I’ve had the honor of caring for thousands of children over the past six years. During my time in practice, I’ve discovered that parents desperately need access to quality pediatric information online. I decided to solve this by bringing the education I was giving every day in my exam room to the online world. And that’s how the Kid Nurse blog was born. I started by tackling a topic that was very personal to me. The title of my first post was my journey leaving the antivaccination movement. I admitted to the world that day that before becoming a pediatric nurse practitioner, I considered myself to be highly skeptical of vaccinations. Growing up, I’d heard all the most notorious accusations against vaccines. Autism, mercury, government agendas, big pharma, you name it. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my mom when I told her my desired career choice. That’s wonderful, she said. But you do realize you’ll have to give vaccines, right? The drawback of administering vaccines nearly made me choose a different specialty. Typically, vaccine hesitant parents delay or refuse vaccines due to their concerns. For most pediatric providers, this is something we encounter on a daily basis. And frankly, many of my healthcare counterparts are very frustrated by this. Now, as I found myself pursuing my master’s degree and coming up with topics for my thesis, I wanted to write about what I had heard from the vaccine hesitant community in which I had grown up. I was ready to study the adverse effects of vaccinations and all the children suffering from them. I wanted to represent those opinions to the scientific community I was now a part of. And that’s when I started to change my mind. I couldn’t find enough substantiated peer-reviewed evidence to indicate that vaccines were harming children. But I was learning a lot about the power that vaccines have to save lives. This was further validated once I was personally responsible for caring for children with preventable infectious disease. I studied a child whose arms and legs had been amputated after menitis nearly cost him his life. I monitored a 5-week old in the hospital with ptus, desperately hoping that she would get better. I admitted a toddler to the ICU with such severe dehydration from roto virus that his pale, limp body was nearly lifeless before being revived. And I saw the devastation in his mother’s eyes when she realized a vaccine she had turned down would have prevented his illness. I interviewed both an emergency room physician and an ICU doctor who said the experience of losing a child to a vaccinereventable injury while the frantic parents watch helplessly never leaves you. It crushes their souls to watch an actress go on TV and say with great confidence the world’s doctors and scientists and all the world’s safety data are wrong. Isn’t the problem here, Jenny, that people sometimes casual or listen with one ear are going to panic and not vaccine at all? Probably. But guess what? It’s not my fault. Why? The reason why they’re not vaccinating is because the vaccines are not safe. It’s especially hard for them because the actress is not there for them in the ICU as they frantically try to save these children who are dying of vaccinereventable diseases. That’s what nurses and doctors do. I interviewed Dr. Kois because he worked in an emergency room in Australia before falling in love with an American girl and moving to the US to work in an emergency room here. I asked him to give a TEDex talk to explain why Australians live 7 years longer than Americans. They’re not that much more slender than Americans and their diet is not that much better. The answer he gave is Aussie healthcare is focused on prevention. The HPV vaccine program is a perfect example. Only about 2% of parents give a hard note of the vaccine in Australia, whereas in America, it’s closer to 23%. And who treats the 14,000 women who get cervical cancer each year in the US and the 4,000 who die of it? Doctors and nurses. They see a very different part of the elephant than the general population does. Now you’re saying, “Chris, read the room. You’re bringing everyone down. Well, would a comedian help? How about I unify the crowd with a rant on vaccines? Huh? That didn’t work. Well, here’s what gives me incredible hope and joy. There are new sheriffs in town, young data scientists, and they are completely transforming our understanding of vaccines. Let’s meet one. Well, great to meet you. The first study I turned into tuned into was the 2022 study on Alzheimer’s versus the flu vaccine. How did that team come together? So, yeah, we are a team of neurologists, epidemiologists and data scientists which naturally don’t like hang out together. We are trained to think in completely different way. We literally speak different languages when we talk about the same thing. We literally use different expression. Urologists understand this is well but they don’t they are not working with like millions of records but data scientists can build some model with millions of record but we don’t know the disease we don’t know that context the original team was nine members and four of you were data geeks and nerds yes one epidemiologist and three bioinformatics people what what does bioinformatics mean epidemiology is about like cause and effect in populations epidemiology start with certain like hypothesis and test that hypothesis using statistic. In biomedical informatics, what we do is that like use machine learning model first and let the data speak first um and then identify certain patterns that we even didn’t think about and then uh drill down to that patterns. And whose idea was it to do this study? Was that Paul’s? That’s really good questions actually. I would say we started from data. You could say like AI’s idea if you like define AI as a machine learning model trained with like large amount of data and flu vaccine constantly showed up as being leaned to reducing the ad Alzheimer disease onset. So that’s how we started flu vaccine as a hypothesis and we go to the we go to the epidemiologist and then we test that flu vaccine hypothesis. So yeah it’s AI’s idea. AI’s idea. That’s that’s fascinating. But then you decided to do other vaccines, right? Yeah. We started with flu vaccine and we found that the flu vaccine actually have like statistically significant effect on reducing the Alzheimer disease onsets and so we actually extend that to other hypothesis like similar other vaccine like TEV and and numco virus and we found that the vaccines’s preventive effect on Alzheimer disease was constantly showed up in other vaccine as well. Typically when we see that kind of like big effect um our first reaction is not excitement we rather we say we think like what are we missing what’s going wrong so we thought about some hidden confounder like uh like like differences in lifestyle or diet or exercise that might be play a role in in uh vaccines effect on Alzheimer disease. Can you describe propensity matching what it is and how you did it? We turn to very large data like insurance claim data. The thing is people don’t get vaccinated randomly. They there are some factors affecting the vaccinations. So we want to make appletoapple comparisons. We want to make sure the vaccinated and the unvaccinated share the very similar uh health conditions. So that’s it’s uh comparable uh it’s a fair comparisons. So propensity score matchings comes in there. This is to just to mimic randomized clinical trial. We identify certain patient that are similar each other except that they getting vaccines or they are not getting vaccine so that we can compare the two groups more uh in a failway. I couldn’t believe how close of a propensity match you could find between the you know when it came to chronic diseases they just lined right up. Did you expect to see alignment that close? Actually yes. uh with this data set with this large amount of patient it’s not that difficult to find very similar patients. Some people may argue your medical claims database did not include gym membership, how much they exercise, how much ko they ate, but it did include this very similar propensity. What do you say to critics who say healthy user bias was still a problem? Yeah, that’s a really good question and and that’s one thing we really want to avoid. So, what we did is that to avoid this lifestyle variation among the cohorts, we did a follow-up study instead of comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated which are very different group. We compared highdosese flu vaccine and standard do flu vaccine among the people who are all vaccinated. So the variation in lifestyle variation in social determin of health are much less than when we comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated. So in that way we can reduce healthy vaccine effects a little bit and the study results show that higher dose vaccine reduce the alter dis risk more than the standard dose vaccine. So this is not just because of the healthy vaccine effect. It might be some some immune work uh immune biology activity loss Chris but I’ll I’ll move forward. So, true confession. 5 minutes after the interview started, Comcast had an outage and we could no longer connect. That’s why I set up that camera to the side of me. So, when you see me staring at the screen, that’s a blank screen. And she had to stare at a blank camera on her end and I had to phone her so I could ask my questions. I felt bad because I had her drive to that studio. So, here are my awkward attempts at trying to lighten the mood. The popular notion that Asians are really good at math. You shouldn’t be reinforcing that with your team. Yes. Yes. Yeah. What a coincidence that everyone’s Asian like Chinese three Chinese and and one Korean. So we all Asians in America. We’re we’re terrified of vaccine side effects. So people are trying to weigh off do I risk the side effects to get the benefit or not? And did you see anything about vaccine side effects in your data? When we do the study, when we work with large scale data with rigorous statistical method, we don’t see that kind of like correlations. The researchers has identified that vaccine doesn’t cause autism. Vaccine doesn’t cause epilepsy. We don’t need to worry about that kind of like terrifying like side effect stories. What do you say to the person who says, “I went to the pediatrician. I got a vaccine and then just a few months later my child was diagnosed with autism.” Yeah, that’s really sad and that’s really frightening. Orism is really frequent in in our population. Vaccine is also very frequent. So that’s why sometimes people make a connection between the two. When we see like large data, we don’t see the connections. we don’t see correlations between autisms and vaccines. So that’s what I can say as a data scientist. But as a human being, as a parent, um yeah, this is really sad. That’s really frightening and I understand. So I would like defer to neurologists or pediatricians to like guide the conversations. And you’re fresh off of maternity leave. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you. Are you going to uh vaccinate your baby? Yes, of course. I already finished all the series of uh vaccines and yeah of course of course absolutely this is more than medicine. This is what scientists have developed for the last several decades to prevent uh to protect our kids. Are we going to see a study from you about covid vaccines? Yes, we plan to study covid vaccine when data is ready. So covid vaccines are too like recent so we need to wait a bit to accumulate long-term data. So, my next question was pretty provocative. Here goes. Are you getting rich off vaccine sales? Um, I I wish I could, but I’m just a data scientist in academia, um, not a farmer executive. Group number four are public health scientists who see a very different side of the elephant. One of the conference organizers mentioned that her youngest children had never been vaccinated. I must have had a look of astonishment on my face because the other speaker broke in quickly as if to forestall any disagreement among us and said that’s a personal family decision. At the time I thought to myself, but I did not say I don’t think it’s a personal family decision. I think it’s a public health decision. Something that I thought of as a routine public health measure could be framed as a personal family decision. This conflict between the individual and the public good is at the heart of vaccination controversy throughout history. And vaccination, unlike other public health measures like public sewers or clean water, is a medical procedure that is performed on people’s bodies. And that is what’s driving the difference between Australia’s HPV vaccination program and ours. It’s a public health effort in Australia because it’s a sexually transmitted disease where the normal methods of protection are not very reliable. My understanding is it only requires skin contact from the general neighborhood. So they see it as in the public good to stop the spread. And it makes sense that they would think of it as in the public good because their health care is public. When I showed the stats that 14,000 women get cervical cancer each year in America, I didn’t mention that an additional at least 250,000 have precancerous lesions removed from their cervixes with a laser. Imagine the cost of that. But I think we all know just how emotional personal freedom is to us Americans and how giving HPV vaccinations in schools like other countries do would cause a mass revolt here. I knew there are some doctors who were vaccine hesitant and I wanted to understand them. I stumbled on this one who got 1.7 million views by just looking at a camera and talking. Nothing fancy. Being a YouTuber myself, my Spidey senses started tingling because I started wondering, what could he be saying that’s so popular that just a talking head video like that could get that many views? Is he saying something that people don’t get to hear from most other doctors and scientists? Hi everyone, Dr. Sil Dan, medical doctor. I want to share with you in this video what happened when I decided not to take the flu shot. I’m not convinced with the evidence behind its efficacy because I actually read science and I look at data. Honestly, people can believe me or not, but I’m telling you the truth hand on heart means something to me. I did not even get a minor upper respiratory tract infection. I would say I definitely consumed more turmeric this time because as well as through food, I was also getting it through supplementation and individual decisions about whether to take a certain therapeutic or a shot. That is something that everybody has to decide on their own. Okay, he’s giving candy to the algorithm. All right, he’s saying I’m a doctor. I read science even though I’m not going to tell you what science I’m reading. I didn’t take the vaccine, but I did take supplements like I sell in my store and I didn’t get sick this year. I won’t mention that 50,000 people did die of the flu last year, most of them unvaccinated, 270 of them children. But it’s a personal choice, so you don’t need to feel bad about the 50,000 vulnerable people who did die because they got the flu from somebody. Compare that to Dr. Mike, who knows a lot about vaccines because he hosts actual scientists on his show. He’s got a much bigger hill to climb to get views with messages like this. The flu is dangerous and deadly. Last winter alone, over 80,000 Americans died from the flu. That’s the highest in a decade. Mind blown. Number three, by you getting the flu shot, you’re supporting herd immunity, essentially limiting the spread of the virus. The people who are most susceptible to the flu, the young, the old, those with weakened immune systems, they need you to get your flu shot to help protect them. By you getting a flu shot, you could be saving a life. How do we understand the fifth group, the truly misinformed? We’re all partly misinformed and all struggling to understand what we are wrong about. Maybe I can give insight on two things that bother me. The first reminds me of when I was on a team trying to indent the smartphone. The most daunting challenge was how to get a message from one phone to another in a crowded place. With dead zones and signals bouncing off different surfaces, we had to let the user know the message was either received or it failed to send. The nightmare scenario is not knowing if it just disappeared into the ether because then users would lose confidence that our phones even worked. That nightmare scenario is the tragedy of vaccines. You don’t get a confirmation from the vaccine after your favorite uncle, the one who doesn’t even know he’s a carrier of HEP B, kisses your newborn son and leaves saliva on his cheek. Hello, this is your HEP vaccine. Your uncle didn’t know it, but he is a carrier. He just exposed your son, but I have you covered because you gave your baby the birth dose a few days ago. I was able to get immunity started. Your son shouldn’t be dying of liver cancer from he exposure around his 40th birthday despite your uncle’s icky saliva. We don’t get that text. We just end up with a 40-year-old healthy son. And we think, “Huh, remember all that fuss about the hepatitis B vaccine back in the day? Why do we do that again? Nobody ever gets hepatitis B.” With the flu, we get no text when it stops certain strains, and it doesn’t tell us when it slows our aging or at least postpones Alzheimer’s. That’s why it took us so many decades to learn this. We only see the strains that it let slip through. We don’t know, and we can’t know which strains it stopped. But the new sheriffs in town do know. With the advent of the giant databases we have now and the new breed of data science nerds, we can now see what we never could see before. The one caveat is we know it for people just like us. We just don’t get a personal text from the vaccine for our own situation. So health care providers, let’s close that loop and get the vaccines texting us directly. Okay, thanks. The second thing is we have something in America no other country has. We have a vaccine injury court that pays lawyers from your taxes to bring vaccine injury cases. The law firms get paid whether they win their cases or not. One of the most famous lawyers is Aaron Siri who runs a firm of a hundred lawyers who bring these cases to the court. Their entire business model funded by the government is to create the belief that vaccines do harm. They would have no clients and no business if they didn’t. He describes scientists and doctors as priests and disciples who follow dogma and vaccines as religion. He spoke at the Kennedy Center three weeks ago and called vaccine studies laughable to much applause. They’re too small and not long enough. And he doubled down on vaccines causing autism and cited as evidence what parents say. Let me be clear. Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Okay. So, vaccines don’t cause autism. And despite um telling parents vaccines don’t cause autism, when surveyed, 40 to 70% of parents the child who’s autistic still point to vaccines as the cause of their child’s autism. Well, yeah. If you’ve got a huge platform and you’ve told parents for decades that vaccines cause autism, that’s what they’re going to say in surveys. Here’s the thing. The court was formed in the 80s before we had all the big data consolidated from electronic health records that we have now. We didn’t have the data science teams then, the computers or the AI we have now. We didn’t have the evidence we do now that vaccines reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s and heart disease and slow aging. We didn’t have safety data from billions of people like we do now. Aaron doesn’t have a background in science, but he is exceptionally skilled at using personal injury law techniques, like undermining the witness and using the lizard strategy, as lawyers call it, to generate fear. Here’s how you undermine a good scientist in a deposition. Ask if they can prove that vaccines do not cause autism. A good scientist will answer no. Science cannot prove a negative. If you ask a good scientist, can you prove the sun will rise in the east tomorrow? They will say science cannot prove that. And then you show the court all the times the scientist said vaccines are safe and effective. And then you use courtroom theatrics to say this proves that scientist is a liar. Then you direct the witness to some of the early trials that were intended to show that vaccines are safe. you give your view that those trials were too small and not long enough to prove safety. He’s right. It’s a mathematical fact that a trial of 40,000 people cannot detect a three ina- million side effect like anaphilaxis. And this is why he directs the court and his clients to old and small safety trials. He has to keep their attention away from the modern data science we have now. The special masters in the court that judge the cases the lawyers bring are themselves lawyers, not scientists, and they have no background in big data. But every time the court awards damages to a family, lawyers use that as evidence of vaccine harm in their marketing. I have a question for you, Aaron, if you’re listening. Since you’re critical of the size of vaccine safety trials, does that mean you’re willing to help recruit participants for the public good? You have a big platform and I’m happy to film your plea for more participants willing to try experimental vaccines on themselves. Or do you think the lines you already use will inspire more people to volunteer? Anybody should be able to still get a vaccine. This America that’s freedom should be able to take risks you want. Can you blame the millions of good people in America who are afraid of vaccines? And that brings me to the final group, antivaccine advocates. Having worked in other fields, my spidey senses were tingling because in every field there are people willing to deny science for money. In climate science, it’s Bjornne Lomborg. In nutrition, it’s Nina Tisho’s. Consider how much antivaccination crusaders make. RFK’s annual salary just from his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, was 836,000 in 2022. According to major speakers bureaus, Jenny McCarthy was getting 50 to 100k per speaking appearance. Andrew Wakefield made his money by moving to America, pulling down speaker and consulting fees to buy an estate in Austin. Of the six groups who see different parts of the elephant, I think this group is the easiest to understand. It’s a path to fame and fortune. You can’t get rich and famous by being a public health worker or a pediatric nurse encouraging vaccinations, nor by being a data scientist publishing papers on vaccines and Alzheimer’s. I think the biggest tell is that when new and compelling data keeps pouring in, they don’t change their position. How can you stick to a talking point for more than a decade that vaccines cause autism or some ingredient in the vaccine that you get in a bigger quantity in food is toxic? Every data scientist in the world can tell you there is no signal for that. But there is one reason those stories are compelling. They strike fear in the hearts of parents. They’re key to getting traction, to getting new clients for your law firm or whatever. I’ve been obsessed for years about how the US could have the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy country and the highest health care costs. Well, data science reveals one very damning reason. Fear of vaccines. Just look at how many lives we lost during the pandemic compared to north of the border. Look at how many lives we’re still losing each year, predominantly in people who don’t get the booster. But here’s the amazing, fantastic news. We can all celebrate by dancing and jumping rope. We now know, thanks to data nerds, how miraculous vaccines are for preventing Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and for slowing aging. We should celebrate this by dancing in the streets. For people who want good information about vaccines, I recommend Dr. Mike’s YouTube channel and the scientists behind the fantastic and popular Substack, your local epidemiologist. I’ve been meaning to interview Matt Willis, one of the authors there. You may be wondering about my conflicts of interest. I did sound like a shill for pharma in this episode. The answer is this is my humble attempt to contribute to the public good in my retirement. I turn off all the ads YouTube will allow me to turn off and I don’t accept sponsors. I don’t remember ever speaking to anyone who works for pharma. I pay to do this. You really mean we pay to do this? But I’m happy to shill for good dancers if you’ve got moves. Morning.