Speaker 1: Pushkin. I recently called up my friend Safie Bacall. I
Speaker 1: wanted to see if he could correctly guess the answer.
Speaker 2: To a puzzle.
Speaker 1: First of all, before we start, I just wanted to
Speaker 1: briefly establish your bona fides for this conversation. You have
Speaker 1: a PhD from m I T is that correct? Stanford, Stanford, Stanford,
Speaker 1: and you went on to be to work on the
Speaker 1: development of a number.
Speaker 3: Of different.
Speaker 1: Drugs, So that's correct.
Speaker 4: I did.
Speaker 1: Safi ran a drug company for a long time that
Speaker 1: worked on some of the hardest problems in cancer treatment.
Speaker 1: In preparation for our call, I sent Safie the package
Speaker 1: insert for something called rototech. As I'm sure you've noticed,
Speaker 1: when you get a prescription drug, there's a leaflet inside
Speaker 1: the box, all folded up, tiny print. That's the package insert.
Speaker 1: It tells you in great detail, every benefit, every side effect,
Speaker 1: every clinical study associated with your medication. The Food and
Speaker 1: Drug Administration and drug companies spend years working out the
Speaker 1: exact wording of that leaflet. And I'm assuming you've never
Speaker 1: read this before.
Speaker 5: Never read it before. I just saw it twenty minutes
Speaker 5: ago whenever you sent it.
Speaker 1: Rod Tech is a vaccine to protect babies against a
Speaker 1: very nasty intestinal bug called rotavirus. What Softie first noticed
Speaker 1: was how well it worked.
Speaker 5: Where I go to right away that's interesting is the
Speaker 5: efficacy data, which is post marketing adverse events description, drug
Speaker 5: interactions Clinical Studies, section fourteen. Yeah, that's amazing. You look
Speaker 5: at table eight on page ten or whatever. Yeap, there
Speaker 5: was one incidence of any grade of diarrhea or gastritis,
Speaker 5: which is what this virus is supposed to protect, and
Speaker 5: fifty one on the placebo arm.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so it's.
Speaker 5: Fifty times higher. Fifty times higher. More kids will get
Speaker 5: some serious or moderate diarrhea or gasprininturitis compared to those
Speaker 5: who got the vaccine. And that tells me, of course
Speaker 5: I want the vaccine for my kid.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If I told you you had a drug undevelopment
Speaker 1: that had efficacy data where there was a fifty x
Speaker 1: difference between treatment and control, what would you what word
Speaker 1: would come out of your mouth?
Speaker 5: That's absolutely astonishing, that's just jaw dropping. You almost never
Speaker 5: see that kind of efficacy in a therapeutic for treating
Speaker 5: active disease. You see it once in a generation. You know,
Speaker 5: a fifty x improvement is incredible.
Speaker 1: And now that Sophia knew what we were talking about,
Speaker 1: it was time to see if he could answer my
Speaker 1: little puzzle, a puzzle connected to the co inventor of rhototech,
Speaker 1: a man named Paul Offitt. I want to read you
Speaker 1: now that we've done this, I want to read you
Speaker 1: from a book. I'm going not to tell you who
Speaker 1: wrote it, but someone in a position of real authority
Speaker 1: in the world. The best evidence indicates that doctor off
Speaker 1: Its rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts. In
Speaker 1: other words, doctor Offitz vaccine almost certainly kills and injured's
Speaker 1: more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease
Speaker 1: killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction.
Speaker 5: That's just complete bullshit. I don't know what else to say.
Speaker 5: That's just you look at this data. This is extremely robust,
Speaker 5: careful data. If you look at the statistics are probably
Speaker 5: and all of the numbers and tables here is just
Speaker 5: absolute nonsense.
Speaker 1: Do you want to guess who wrote that?
Speaker 5: Does it rhyme with jeneity?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh, Sophie, you win the prize. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. This episode is the very strange story of
Speaker 1: Rhodo tech I vaccine that every American infant is supposed
Speaker 1: to get three times in their first eight months of life,
Speaker 1: or rather, the very strange campaign waged against Rhodo tech
Speaker 1: by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the Secretary of Health and
Speaker 1: Human Services, the man in charge of every aspect of health,
Speaker 1: medicine and research in the United States. If you are
Speaker 1: the parents of small children in the developed world in
Speaker 1: the twenty first century, diarrhea is not high on your
Speaker 1: list of things you worry about. But that was not
Speaker 1: true of your parents when you were a child, or
Speaker 1: your parents' parents, or anyone else for that matter, going
Speaker 1: back as far as human beings go, particularly those living
Speaker 1: in the poorest parts of the world, this is what
Speaker 1: it used to be like.
Speaker 6: There's one vivid memory that I can actually think of
Speaker 6: is going into these pediatric wards and you had patients,
Speaker 6: these children literally to the point that you would actually
Speaker 6: have a daria ward, a separate daria ward, because that
Speaker 6: was the quantum of cases that you would see in
Speaker 6: hospitals without exception.
Speaker 1: This is vishwejit Kumar, a pediatrician and public health researcher
Speaker 1: in Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest states in India,
Speaker 1: Remembering his days as an intern in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 6: You have babies who come in dehydrated, severely dehydrated, and
Speaker 6: the force thing, you know, sunken eyes. You know, you
Speaker 6: could just pull their skin and you'll find that, you know,
Speaker 6: they just don't retract because there's no doug of pressure.
Speaker 1: A small child would get sick with the rotavirus, they
Speaker 1: would run a fever, they would start vomiting, they would
Speaker 1: develop severe diarrhea as the virus rea havoc in their
Speaker 1: stomach and intestines. That's three sources of dehydration suddenly and simultaneously.
Speaker 1: And if the child was far from a hospital and
Speaker 1: already malnourished, they were in trouble. The best estimates at
Speaker 1: the time were the children in developing countries had between
Speaker 1: four and eight episodes of severe diarrhea in their first
Speaker 1: five years of life, each lasting from two to ten days.
Speaker 1: For doctor Kamar, this meant a giant room for those
Speaker 1: shrunken infants, two and sometimes three to a bed.
Speaker 6: So you have these sweepers whose job is to just
Speaker 6: keep cleaning the mess, or the parents would do it,
Speaker 6: or the parents would clean it. You know.
Speaker 3: And of the children in that ward in that era,
Speaker 3: how many would you lose?
Speaker 6: Okay, so let's say that is a hundred of them
Speaker 6: will come in with severe and life threatening darreet, you'd
Speaker 6: lose ten percent for sure.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, I mean to lose one. To be
Speaker 3: a doctor and lose one baby must is emotionally overwhelming.
Speaker 3: You're talking about over the course. So though, over the
Speaker 3: course of working in a ward, you would lose dozens
Speaker 3: of children over the course of months.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, So to give you an example, so we
Speaker 6: do these verbal autopsies because hospitals don't have good records,
Speaker 6: and so essentially reconstruct that event so that then experts
Speaker 6: can sit around and say this possibly could have led
Speaker 6: to BED. I have never been able to go through
Speaker 6: one verbal autopsy in one city.
Speaker 7: What do you mean?
Speaker 6: It's so heartbreaking because you're like, oh, you know, this
Speaker 6: could have been so, this could have been prevented.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 6: It's like you look at these cases and see every
Speaker 6: newborn dies. That is one mother who also in some
Speaker 6: ways there is some part of it dies with her.
Speaker 1: The battle against rotavirus took years. First, the virus itself
Speaker 1: had to be identified, separated out from all the other
Speaker 1: pathogens that can cause diarrhea in young children. Then a
Speaker 1: vaccine had to be constructed from that newly identified virus,
Speaker 1: another time consuming ten One of the leading groups working
Speaker 1: on the problem was at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: at a lab run by Paul Offitt. You helped develop
Speaker 1: the rotavirus vaccine in what year did that? Did that
Speaker 1: come out?
Speaker 7: Two thousand and six, two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: How long did you work on that?
Speaker 7: Twenty six years?
Speaker 5: Wow?
Speaker 1: Why was that a hard problem to solve?
Speaker 7: I don't think it was terribly hard to solve. It
Speaker 7: just takes a long time to solve these things. Although
Speaker 7: the veterinarians knew this to be a cause of disease
Speaker 7: and animals since the forties, it wasn't really described as
Speaker 7: a human pathoge until the seventies, so there wasn't a
Speaker 7: lot of information about this. So we developed a small
Speaker 7: animal model for the disease in the early eighties, and
Speaker 7: then we figured out and simply put which part of
Speaker 7: the virus made you sick and which part of the
Speaker 7: virus induced immune sponsor that was protective, and with that information,
Speaker 7: we then combined strains that were a virulent benign with
Speaker 7: virulent strains to knock out the virulent part but include
Speaker 7: the protective part, Thus summarizing twenty six years of work
Speaker 7: in forty seconds.
Speaker 1: Offits group took their candidate vaccine to the drug company Merk,
Speaker 1: which spent well over a billion dollars to bring the
Speaker 1: candidate vaccine to market. The result was Rottech And.
Speaker 7: With that, you know, the vaccine eliminated, really eliminated hospitalizations
Speaker 7: from this country.
Speaker 6: We don't really.
Speaker 7: Most pediatric residents in our hospital have never seen an
Speaker 7: inpatient with rotavirus, which is amazing because it dominated my residency.
Speaker 1: It dominated your residency.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, no, you over the winter, you were just
Speaker 7: flooded with kids both in the emergency department and coming
Speaker 7: into the hospital severe dehydration. Yeah, and now the one
Speaker 7: and now the hospitalizations are gone.
Speaker 1: Other rotavirus vaccines followed. A group of scientists in India
Speaker 1: developed their own in twenty sixteen. Also around this time,
Speaker 1: many developing countries made huge strides in sanitation, which cut
Speaker 1: down on the spread of the virus. Oral rehydration therapy
Speaker 1: became widespread, and now the dedicated diarrhe awards that were
Speaker 1: such a big part of Kumar's training are all but gone.
Speaker 1: It's hard to find anyone who works with children and
Speaker 1: remembers the way things were who isn't in love with
Speaker 1: the rotavirus vaccine. And you s have lists the most
Speaker 1: important innovations that you've seen that have affected the lives
Speaker 1: of children. Where does this rank.
Speaker 8: At the top amongst the top?
Speaker 1: This is doctor Zulfikar Bhutah, co director for the Center
Speaker 1: of Global Child Health at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.
Speaker 1: He spent years as a pediatrician in his native Pakistan.
Speaker 8: We went down from ten million child debts under five
Speaker 8: in the year two thousand by twenty fifteen to just
Speaker 8: under six million deaths. Today they are down to around
Speaker 8: three million debts in children on the five. It's the
Speaker 8: fastest rate of reduction in child deaths and the history
Speaker 8: of mankind. And it hasn't just happened by happens fast.
Speaker 1: And this is the vaccine that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Speaker 2: Hates.
Speaker 1: I have to confess that I knew very little about
Speaker 1: Robert F. Kennedy Junior before he ran for president in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. But as he loomed larger and larger
Speaker 1: in the news, I realized I had his most recent book,
Speaker 1: The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the
Speaker 1: Global War on Democracy and Public Health. His publicist must
Speaker 1: have sent me a review copy when it came out
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. I found it in a big
Speaker 1: pile of books on the porch, so I decided to
Speaker 1: read it all four hundred and ninety two pages. And
Speaker 1: it was there in chapter three that I discovered the
Speaker 1: particular loathing that RFK Junior has for the rotavirus vaccines.
Speaker 1: I couldn't make head nor tails of it, which is
Speaker 1: why I had to call my friend Safi boocall up.
Speaker 1: We were going over the package insert, which you thought
Speaker 1: was clean as a whistle, Yeah, right, And so I
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out why, if it was as
Speaker 1: clean as a whistle, does Kennedy have such a problem
Speaker 1: with rototech and rotavirus vaccines in general? And I want
Speaker 1: to read to you the key paragraph in his book,
Speaker 1: which and we're going to try and solve this puzzle together,
Speaker 1: because I have a vague idea, but I think i'm
Speaker 1: I can't my idea is so reflects so poorly on
Speaker 1: him that I part of me thinks it can't be
Speaker 1: the right idea. This is the key paragraph. Reported adverse
Speaker 1: reactions from doctor off its roto Tech vaccine ranged from
Speaker 1: nine hundred and fifty three to sixteen hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: nine per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, into
Speaker 1: susception since severe combined immunity deficiency. See Kennedy lists twenty
Speaker 1: different really bad things he thinks are associated with rhodo Tech,
Speaker 1: ending with gastro enteritis, pneumonia, and death. Then he writes
Speaker 1: the paragraph that I read to Sofi at the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode. The list of adverse reactions is so
Speaker 1: long that rot tech quote almost certainly kills and injures
Speaker 1: more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease
Speaker 1: killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction. Now, I
Speaker 1: have to say that at this point things get deeply confusing,
Speaker 1: because I couldn't figure out where that number nine hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty three to sixteen hundred and eighty nine adverse
Speaker 1: reactions a year comes from. In the real Anthony Fauci
Speaker 1: Kennedy lists as his source the package INCERT, but those
Speaker 1: numbers aren't in the package INCERT. We hired a fact
Speaker 1: checker with a PhD in biology, and she couldn't figure
Speaker 1: out where Kennedy's numbers come from either. Then we thought, oh,
Speaker 1: he got the numbers from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,
Speaker 1: which is the government run database where anyone can report
Speaker 1: a side effect that they think is associated with a
Speaker 1: vaccine keyword think. But VEHIRS is in Kennedy's source either.
Speaker 1: We found the numbers. VERS only has three hundred and
Speaker 1: forty four reports of side effects over fifteen years for
Speaker 1: all rotavirus vaccines, of which only thirty two are serious,
Speaker 1: which is like miles and miles away from the massive
Speaker 1: number of problems that Kennedy's talking about. And even if
Speaker 1: he just made a typo and read the numbers wrong,
Speaker 1: it still doesn't prove his case because, as the CDC says, quote,
Speaker 1: a report to VERS does not mean a vaccine caused
Speaker 1: an adverse event end quote. So just because a baby
Speaker 1: vomited after getting his rototech doesn't mean rototech caused the
Speaker 1: vomiting baby's vomit. All the time to prove the vaccine
Speaker 1: was the cause of the side effect. You really have
Speaker 1: to dig into the data look for patterns, or, better yet,
Speaker 1: go back to the original clinical trial and see if
Speaker 1: there were any clues when the vaccine was first tested
Speaker 1: for side effects. In the case of rhodotech, the clinical
Speaker 1: trial was enormous. Twelve countries, thirty four thousand infants were
Speaker 1: given the vaccine, thirty four thousand were given a pacbo.
Speaker 1: The babies were followed for a full year, and absolutely
Speaker 1: every medical event that happened to them was recorded and analyzed.
Speaker 1: Sixty eight thousand babies. If in the course of a
Speaker 1: year the babies who got the vaccine had more complications
Speaker 1: than the babies who got the placebo, then that would
Speaker 1: raise a red flag. It would suggest, wait, maybe the
Speaker 1: vomiting was the result of the vaccine, But if there
Speaker 1: was no difference in the experience of those two groups,
Speaker 1: it would suggest any associated problems were just the kind
Speaker 1: of health problems that you'd expect to see as a
Speaker 1: matter of course, in a very large group of babies.
Speaker 1: All of this data is laid out in the package.
Speaker 5: Insert page five the SAE series adverse events, and you
Speaker 5: would just look at that table and you would say,
Speaker 5: no difference.
Speaker 1: The table is a comparison of side effects in the
Speaker 1: kids who got the vaccine and the kids who didn't.
Speaker 5: Numerically, if anything, there were more essays on the placebo
Speaker 5: than the control arm. But it's insignificantly. It's like the
Speaker 5: difference between eating a banana or an apple. Yeah, no difference.
Speaker 1: Together, we went through every one of the medical problems
Speaker 1: listed on the chart. Gos true and is point six
Speaker 1: percent treatment? Treatment? What's that placibo? He would just use
Speaker 1: it is that where we are now? We kept finding
Speaker 1: the same thing. No difference, no difference in any difference.
Speaker 5: Let's see point six point six No, no difference and seizures.
Speaker 5: See where are your next page? Yes, seizures. Yes, Numerically
Speaker 5: maybe a little higher, but the SAEs were exactly the same.
Speaker 1: But somehow Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion in his book
Speaker 1: The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy writes, quote, since its approval,
Speaker 1: doctor Offit's rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic
Speaker 1: illnesses and agonizing death.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's just.
Speaker 4: A stonishingly. It just makes it just astonishing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so wait, what's he doing?
Speaker 1: He looked at the same thing you looked at and
Speaker 1: decided that the rotavirus vaccine was causing this enormous burden
Speaker 1: of adverse reactions. I have to say I got completely
Speaker 1: obsessed with this. Where is RFK Junior getting his information?
Speaker 1: And what about the data from the clinical trial? Did
Speaker 1: he not read it? Did he read it and not
Speaker 1: understand it? Or did he read it and understand it
Speaker 1: and just say yah. You have a simple chart that
Speaker 1: has two columns, one columns called pacebo and one columns
Speaker 1: called treatment. And he decided to completely ignore the column
Speaker 1: called pacbo right exactly.
Speaker 9: He decided to reach a conclusion about the vaccine by
Speaker 9: looking at it by by by fundamentally not just misinterpreting.
Speaker 9: He got a he's one eighty one hundred and eighty
Speaker 9: degrees wrong in his interpretation of the data, and he
Speaker 9: had to he had to place It's as if he
Speaker 9: took his hand and placed it over the side of
Speaker 9: the chart that says placebo, like there has to be
Speaker 9: some agency here that allows you to look at something
Speaker 9: that has two rows and only see one row.
Speaker 4: Well, firstly, I doubt that he actually looked at this source.
Speaker 4: I'm furious, A pretty busy guy, and you know.
Speaker 10: But Spasafi, he writes half of an entire chapter denouncing
Speaker 10: the ronavirus vaccine. It's not like this is this is
Speaker 10: not a He's not making this observation in passing. He's
Speaker 10: going after at length one of the most significant public
Speaker 10: health advances of the last twenty five years, right, telling
Speaker 10: us get his saved millions of lives. This is not
Speaker 10: trivial stakes here, right, he's big game hunting here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wasn't he trained as a lawyer? I don't know he's
Speaker 4: a lawyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because on the last I
Speaker 4: guess I try to air on sort of generous explanations
Speaker 4: and maybe you are you go on the other side.
Speaker 4: I don't know. But aren't lawyers trained to do that
Speaker 4: sort of thing, dig deep into facts and make a
Speaker 4: case or prove or disprove a case. You would think
Speaker 4: that would be part of your legal training.
Speaker 1: But if you if you was you're a lawyer, and
Speaker 1: made this argument in court, you would be humiliated by
Speaker 1: opposing counsel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he would take five seconds.
Speaker 1: Who just hold up the chart and say, oops, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the other side.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One last one of but a very specific one, which
Speaker 1: is if you're going to do this. Why does he
Speaker 1: link to the source that refutes his argument? He so
Speaker 1: I can understand. I want to completely misinterpret the clinical
Speaker 1: data on rhodo tech. I want to make the sorry
Speaker 1: about vaccines, and I'm going to clasp my fingers and
Speaker 1: hope that ninety five percent of my readers don't notice.
Speaker 3: But then he gives you the link to the very
Speaker 3: thing that shows you that he's absolutely wrong.
Speaker 1: Who does this?
Speaker 3: He's not even a good liar.
Speaker 11: What was that word that they used a few years ago, truthiness? Yeah, right,
Speaker 11: there must be an equivalent word of scienceiness. My book
Speaker 11: has sciency neus because it has footnotes that are sciency done.
Speaker 1: By the way, this isn't even the half of it.
Speaker 1: If you spend any time at all immersed in the
Speaker 1: words and thoughts of rfk Jr. It's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: the person who he hates above all others is Anthony Fauci.
Speaker 1: Kennedy really really doesn't like Anthony Fauci. He wrote a
Speaker 1: four hundred and ninety two page book about how much
Speaker 1: he hates Anthony Fauci. But do you know who's a
Speaker 1: close number two? Paul Offit, the inventor of rototech in
Speaker 1: the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy spends pages on off It.
Speaker 1: He writes off It quote represents himself as an authoritative
Speaker 1: source of reliable information, but he's actually a fond of
Speaker 1: wild industry bally who prevarication and outright fraud end quote.
Speaker 1: Tune into any of the countless podcast interviews Kennedy has
Speaker 1: given and you'll find the same thing. After he's gone
Speaker 1: after Fauci, he goes after Offit, to the point where
Speaker 1: after Kennedy goes on Joe Rogan and went on one
Speaker 1: of his usual Paul off At rants, off It got
Speaker 1: death threats and hate mail.
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't know if this is the whole
Speaker 7: Rogan thing, but he attacks me all the time because
Speaker 7: I committed the unpardonable sin of being the going ventnor
Speaker 7: of the rodavirus vaccine, which by the way, saves about
Speaker 7: one hundred and sixty five thousand lives a year in
Speaker 7: the in the world. I thought that was a good thing,
Speaker 7: but apparently, according to him, I'm just the pharma show.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I keep seeing him go after you, and I'm
Speaker 1: trying to sort of understand, but he's never to your knowledge,
Speaker 1: has he ever kind of acknowledged what you what you
Speaker 1: guys created was of value to mankind. Has he's never
Speaker 1: has he ever acknowledged that no. One hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: five thousand people a year doesn't believe it?
Speaker 7: But did he?
Speaker 1: I mean, did he actually work through the logic of this?
Speaker 7: So he just not publicly? I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 7: I don't know what how his brain works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: Maybe it was that warm, Maybe the worm was telling
Speaker 7: him to do it.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but this is
Speaker 1: just bizarre. If I was someone who really didn't like
Speaker 1: vaccines and I was writing my massive opus on the subject,
Speaker 1: I'd pick a really marginal vaccine to go after, something
Speaker 1: with dubious benefits, lots of side effects, something with a
Speaker 1: Veri's data was really alarming, I don't know, an inexplicable
Speaker 1: wave of strokes or seizures or something worrisome in people
Speaker 1: who got the vaccines. But what does Kennedy do the opposite?
Speaker 1: He goes after maybe one of the most important public
Speaker 1: health triumphs of the last one hundred years, a vaccine
Speaker 1: with a package insert that is so immaculate that he
Speaker 1: literally has to create an objection that is transparently false.
Speaker 1: It makes no sense. By the way, if you're wondering
Speaker 1: why we didn't just call up RFK Junior himself and
Speaker 1: ask him directly, oh, we tried over and over again, calls,
Speaker 1: emails right up to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Speaker 5: Thank you for calling the United States Department of.
Speaker 2: Health and Human Services.
Speaker 1: Total run around. Then to his lawyer, longtime confidant, Aaron Siri,
Speaker 1: who was all willing to be interviewed until I told
Speaker 1: him I wanted to talk about the rotavirus vaccine, at
Speaker 1: which point he put all kinds of stipulations and restrictions
Speaker 1: on how our interview would proceed, including the fact that
Speaker 1: we couldn't tape record it. And then when we finally
Speaker 1: did talk, Siri couldn't come up with any kind of
Speaker 1: plausible explanation for what his good friend and client was doing.
Speaker 3: Either.
Speaker 1: I thought, is there someone else like a call? Was
Speaker 1: I ever going to get to the bottom of this?
Speaker 1: And then I realized, maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I
Speaker 1: just need to keep reading Kennedy's book, And so I did,
Speaker 1: and sure enough, there it was the answer in chapter nine,
Speaker 1: entitled The White Man's Burden. One of the pre eminent
Speaker 1: figures in modern medicine was the nineteenth century French microbiologist
Speaker 1: Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is the pioneer of germ theory. Infectious
Speaker 1: diseases are the result of foreign microorganisms that invade the body.
Speaker 1: Every time you get a vaccine created specifically against a
Speaker 1: particular virus, or take an antibiotic optimized to fight a
Speaker 1: specific strain of bacteria, you are following Pastor's logic. Germ
Speaker 1: theory is one of the foundational ideas of modern medicine,
Speaker 1: and in chapter nine of The Real Anthony Fauci, we
Speaker 1: learned that Robert F. Kennedy Junior doesn't believe in germ theory.
Speaker 1: He is instead a follower of Pastor's nemesis. Another nineteenth
Speaker 1: century French microbiologist named Antoine Beauchamp. Bichamp argued that Pester
Speaker 1: had it backwards. You don't get sick because you've been
Speaker 1: infected by a bug. The bug emerges in response to
Speaker 1: the fact that your body was already sick. The bug
Speaker 1: is a symptom, not cause. What matters is the terrain
Speaker 1: of the body, an individual's internal state of health. It's
Speaker 1: really hard to find people who believe in Antoine Beauchamp's theories.
Speaker 1: I spent hours on the internet looking before finally stumbling
Speaker 1: upon another disciple. Maybe you'll recognize his voice.
Speaker 12: And past tour believed the germ theory. Obviously, that's the
Speaker 12: theory that he pushed, right, and then Benchamp believed in
Speaker 12: the terrain theory. Now that's what I believe.
Speaker 1: This is the actor Woody Harrelson on Joe Rogan.
Speaker 12: Of course, the terrain theory, the germ theory. Obviously, a pathogen,
Speaker 12: a germ, a virus, whatever lands in your corn flakes
Speaker 12: or on your eyeball or whatever, it gets inside and
Speaker 12: then in this blank, pristine, blank slate environment, it causes damage,
Speaker 12: maybe sickness, and eventually death.
Speaker 3: To me, I don't believe this theory as much as I.
Speaker 12: Do the terrain theory, which is that your health is
Speaker 12: dependent upon your internal biological terrain and your internal filthiness
Speaker 12: or cleanliness. And so that's what I believe is where
Speaker 12: people's immune system gets messed up from what they're consuming,
Speaker 12: and in a nutshell, that's why I believe in Bechamp's
Speaker 12: theory as opposed to the germ theory.
Speaker 1: I should point out guess who whatdy? Harrelson is good
Speaker 1: friends with RFK Junior. So maybe what we're looking at
Speaker 1: here is not two BIS champions who arrived at the
Speaker 1: same conclusion independently, but one BI champion who infected another
Speaker 1: in defiance of everything BI champion. Of course, there is
Speaker 1: some truth to terrain theory. Diabetes and heart disease are
Speaker 1: the result in part of what Beauchamp would call a
Speaker 1: disturbed terrain. A body that, because of obesity, was smoking,
Speaker 1: or bad nutrition or a lack of exercise, has become
Speaker 1: vulnerable to chronic disease. But Kennedy, he doesn't stop there.
Speaker 1: He's a radical BI champion. He believes that if you're
Speaker 1: otherwise healthy, the cold virus is just not going to
Speaker 1: be an issue. HIV is probably not going to give
Speaker 1: you AIDS, not if you take care of yourself. There's
Speaker 1: a whole chapter on HIV and AIDS in his book
Speaker 1: making a version of this argument. Early in his time
Speaker 1: as Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was a
Speaker 1: major outbreak of measles in Texas, and Kennedy's response was
Speaker 1: so lackadaisical that his press secretary quit, it seems, in
Speaker 1: disgust Measles's only a problem if you're unhealthy. The virus
Speaker 1: is the symptom, not the cause. It took several months,
Speaker 1: two children dying, and over five hundred cases for him
Speaker 1: to finally give an interview where he said, Okay, you
Speaker 1: should get the measles shot. Kennedy is unhappy to this
Speaker 1: day that in the nineteenth century battle between Louis Pasteuur
Speaker 1: and Antoine Beauchamp, Pasteur came out on top. Listen, this
Speaker 1: is from the audiobook version of the real Anthony Fauci
Speaker 1: being read by what really really seems like AI.
Speaker 2: For Better or Worse, The champions of germ theory, Louis
Speaker 2: Pasteur and Robert coch proved victorious in their fierce decades
Speaker 2: long battle with their miasmist rival and Twine Bechamp.
Speaker 1: Just so you're aware, if you're thinking of getting the audiobook,
Speaker 1: you're in for twenty seven hours and twenty minutes of this.
Speaker 2: The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of
Speaker 2: the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory
Speaker 2: as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A one
Speaker 2: trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions,
Speaker 2: and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology
Speaker 2: led by Little Napoleon himself Anthony Fauci, fortifies the century
Speaker 2: old predominance of theory.
Speaker 1: What doesn't RFK Junior like pills, powders, pricks, and potions,
Speaker 1: the very things that the Department of Health and Human
Speaker 1: Services brings to the world. And of all the pills
Speaker 1: and powders and pricks within his domain, the one he
Speaker 1: hates the most is rototech. And why does he hate rototech?
Speaker 1: Because he's a bi champion, and a bi champion has
Speaker 1: to hate rototech because if Kennedy admits that rototech works,
Speaker 1: then the whole edifice of nineteen century pseudoscience that he
Speaker 1: has committed himself to comes tumbling down. RFK Junior likes
Speaker 1: to pretend that he is alarmed by vaccines that do
Speaker 1: not work. No, he's alarmed by vaccines that do work.
Speaker 1: Heaven help us next time on Revisionist History. The plot
Speaker 1: dickens and the virus spreads MARV K Junior to Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: And then we run into each other and Aspen just
Speaker 2: Randa is the weirdest moment because we're both staring at
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then we almost did it like a full
Speaker 7: three six.
Speaker 2: Eight yeah yeah, yeah. I noticed you walking. I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's it is, so I said, hey, what's up.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence,
Speaker 1: and bend A da f Hafrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Kate Ferby, Original scoring by Luis Kara,
Speaker 1: engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing and mastering on this
Speaker 1: episode by Marcelo Dia Lavera. Production support from Luke LeMond.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah
Speaker 1: X and el Hafe Gretacombe. I'm Malcolm Glampo.