Do Vaccines Cause Autism? An interview with Paul Thomas, MD

Are vaccines right for your child?

If so, which ones? Dr. Paul Thomas, author of the The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, answers these questions and more based on research and his experience with 1,000’s of patients.

Is there a connection between #autism & #vaccines? Watch this interview with @drpaulapproved @drbenlynch

Dr Ben: Alright. I’m super excited to bring you on board today, Paul. It’s a pleasure. I’ve watched your YouTube channel which is the first thing that brought me to you, and then when I realized that you’re the author of this amazing work, I got really excited. So, Paul, thank you for your work, and what you are going to be discussing today with me is very, very useful for the listener. I encourage you if you’re listening to stick with us because not only is Paul very, very smart and focused on vaccinations and pediatrics, he’s hella funny. Dr. Paul, thanks for joining me today.

Dr. Paul: Thanks for having me on, Ben.

Dr. Ben: Your website so people can learn more about you?

Dr. Paul: We’ve got DrPaulApproved.com and DoctorPaul.md. Those are my two websites.

Dr. Ben: Fantastic. You’re a practicing MD out of Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Paul: That’s right.

Dr. Ben: You specialize in?

Dr. Paul: I’m a board-certified pediatrician and I’m also board-certified in integrative medicine.

Dr. Ben: Excellent. That’s a fantastic and much-needed combination.

Dr. Paul: Yes it is. 

Dr. Ben: Wish there were more of them. How long you been practicing?

Dr. Paul: I’ve been practicing about 30 years, in private practice for about 25.

Dr. Ben: That’s a lot of kids.

Dr. Paul: That’s a lot of kids. I have 13,000 patients in my practice.

Dr. Ben: Wow. With your book, The Vaccine Friendly Plan, you vaccinated a lot of kids.

Dr. Paul: Absolutely.

Dr. Ben: I mean thousands.

Dr. Paul: Thousands and thousands.

Dr. Ben: So what I like about your book is it’s not fear-based. It’s education-based. It’s a needed tool so people can take action. Why did you write this book? After vaccinating thousands of children, what was the tipping point for you to say, “Now that’s it. I’m sitting down, buckling down on my busy practice and I’m going to write this thing.”

Dr. Paul: That’s the perfect question, Ben. Thank you for asking it. I was Dartmouth trained. I did my pediatric residency three years in the UC California system. I was sold on the benefits of vaccines and I really hadn’t seen or at least been aware of any side effects. This is true for most pediatricians. Most doctors were trained on the benefits, and the side effect part of it or the ingredients in the vaccines it’s just not part of our training. Things were going along okay until the early 2000s. I started seeing for myself in my practice. I started reading in the journals this increase in autism, and it wasn’t just autism by the way. I mean as a pediatrician busy seeing a lot of kids, we were starting to see more and more kids with allergies, asthma. Diabetes has been on the rise. Developmental delays of various sorts, ADD, ADHD, anxiety and those conditions I just rattled off just to name a few are continuing to explode in their prevalence. For example in my practice now of 13,000 patients, I have almost a thousand kids with ADD or ADHD. I have a few hundred with anxiety or depression. I have almost 300 with autism or autism spectrum. That’s not what it was like when I first started practice.

To get back to answering your question, it was in 2005, 2006, 2007, actually it was 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, it was four years in a row, I had a child who was actually my patient in my practice normal at age one regress into severe autism by age two. The first time it happened and all the pediatric journals were going “It’s just a coincidence. Vaccines are safe and effective. It has nothing to do with vaccines.” I was believing that because that’s what I was reading. But when it happened a second time, I thought I guess it probably could be a coincidence. 

By the fourth time I walked into this room, it was a November 20, 2007 and here in front of me was this little fellow in one of those little push strollers. His back was to the window. He’s facing me and he was just like this. I went with into my electronic medical record. I’m going what the heck. I could tell there was a change. He had been completely normal. I had seen him at a year. My nurse practitioner had seen him at 18 months, documented normal development, and language was developing. We now had in front of us a nonverbal, no eye contact, severely over stimulated kid. My heart just broke. By that point, I’d already learned about mercury in certain vaccines and how incredibly toxic that was. I was becoming aware of the aluminum issue and so many of the vaccines have a very large dose of aluminum put in there as an adjuvant to stimulate the immune system, but it also has toxicity. I made a decision. I knew too much. I could no longer ethically recommend hepatitis B for newborns. There was a special concern about the MMR around that time in the autism community that somehow it seemed I mean story after story, and I was hearing these stories in my patients that it was after the MMR whether it was given at 12 months or 15 or 18 months, they just lost their kid. Sometimes they lost their kid quickly within days, sometimes it was weeks or months. Some of these kids would just get extremely irritable, lose their eye contact, lose their language.

Of course there weren’t good studies at that point where you could turn to the literature and get that question-answer. All we had was the Institute of Medicine saying there’s no link and case closed. But it didn’t feel right. If you’re paying attention to what’s going on in front of you, it didn’t feel right.

I started my practice integrated pediatrics in June of 2008, and that’s where I’ve been to this day. The key aspects of how we were vaccinating differently using the best information I can get my hands on and a good dose of common sense was as long as birth mother did not have hepatitis B, we didn’t do that vaccine for infants. Your listeners should be aware that hepatitis B is a virus that you catch from sex and IV drug use, basically. If you’re an infant and your mother has hepatitis B, it’s possible to get it that way.

In this country the CDC says one percent of mothers have Hepatitis B. My own research shows it to be more like 0.1 percent, but anyway it’s a very small number. At least 99 percent of mothers, 100 percent of my practice, you might be interested to know I have not had a single case of a mother who has hepatitis B as a busy pediatrician. Mind you I’m in a suburban practice. I’m not downtown with the homeless and high-risk populations. If you don’t have risk factors, mom you don’t have hep B, your infant absolutely does not need the hepatitis b vaccine. It has a huge dose of aluminum. It’s a known neurotoxin. There are studies showing aluminum in infancy is associated with increased autism at least in boys and there’s no benefit. 

Sometimes with vaccines it’s about timing. When I was in medical school I got that vaccine as I went into medical school. My oldest child, who is now 30, got that vaccine as a preteen teenager, and then the younger kids got it earlier because it got moved back in around. In Oregon, it was around 2000, 2001 that we moved it to the newborn period. Prior to that we’ve been giving it to teenagers.

Dr. Ben: When you say “we”, who’s “we”?

Dr. Paul: The medical people, pediatricians, recommendations from the Academy of Pediatrics, CPC. I mean it was sort of rolled out I think over a decade but most states most pediatricians didn’t start the newborn hep B process until about 2001, maybe 2002. Help me remember. Where was I at with your question? 

Dr. Ben: You answered it and you answered it phenomenally. Thank you. And then you started going into my next question, so I just let you roll with it which is if you were to say hey these vaccinations I really think, like you said, it’s a risk-benefit right that you need to determine. It’s all about weighing those odd. If your infant isn’t sexually active or doing IV drugs, which they don’t, then why do that unless mom has hep B. That’s fantastic. What other vaccines are you saying “Look, there are risks way up here and the benefits are way down here for most populations and most kids?” Once they reach a certain age, maybe those risks aren’t going down, the benefits start going up. Walk us through which vaccines that you think don’t do at a young age, and maybe as they get older consider it and other ones just don’t do period. Let’s start with the ones we just don’t do period.

Dr. Paul: Don’t do period: For me it’s the HPV vaccine. It’s interesting that I would say that a time when the CDC is making a huge push to promote that vaccine.

Dr. Ben: Yes. I hear it on the radio stations.

Dr. Paul: There’s ads on TV. I mean it’s like this massive push to do this vaccine. I attended a conference put on to look at the HPV issue so it’s just last month here in the Portland area. It turns out it was sponsored by Merck, the CDC, and the American Cancer Society, and their whole goal was how are we going to get more people vaccinated. They weren’t asking the question “Does this vaccine make sense? Is this vaccine safe? Should we even be doing this vaccine?” It’s like that’s been decided and it’s all push about how to get more vaccines done.

Here’s the problem with that vaccine, and people who were around when it came out about 10 years ago and paying attention, you should have caught this right at the get-go. The HPV 4, the first one that came out, about 90 percent of their control studies used a huge dose of aluminum as the control. The most toxic ingredient in the HPV vaccine, the most toxic ingredient in it is aluminum. What they did was they took that same high-dose aluminum to put it in their control. If you’re a scientist, you understand a true control for a shot should be saline. I think they had about 10 percent that way they could say they used saline. But no, 90 percent of the control group was injected high-dose aluminum. You look at the outcomes from those studies and they were horrible. I mean there were a lot of deaths. Sure, some of them were car accidents, one was an airplane crash. But overall the death rate, if you plug that number into the four million births per year and then run that through the population, the deaths from that vaccine with so far exceed the 40,000 cases of cancer they might prevent. They’re not even in the same ballpark. Right there we had a problem with how they designed those studies.

Problem 2 was they stopped the studies after three-and-a-half years. It was supposed to be a five-year study. At three and a half years, they showed some decrease in pre-cancer and it was statistically significant and they stopped the studies because they wanted that data. They have never shown that it actually prevents any cancer because here’s the problem. Cervical cancer from HPV takes decades, usually at least one or two decades to develop. The vaccines only been out for ten years, so we still don’t know if it’s even preventing a single case of cancer.

If you’ve got scientists and doctors watching this, they’re going to go “Wait a minute, they just published in JAMA a really great study showing it prevents cancer.” That’s what the headline says. Read the study. Go to the actual data and you will see that they broke the patients into categories, and the youngest two or three categories showed a decrease in pre-cancer, but the oldest group which is the group that’s been around long enough to have developed cancer actually had an increase in cancer in the vaccinated arm of that study. It’s in their research. It’s actually in their conclusions sort of hidden in a very short little sentence surrounded by all these wonderful reduced cancer verbiage. We need more studies. Until we get proper studies, that vaccine to me is just plain not safe. There are other countries in the world that are no longer doing it because they have a society that’s more open and physicians are allowed to make common sense judgments based on what they’re learning. In these countries, Israel I believe, India think, there’s a few others, they stopped recommending that vaccine. That would be one to answer your question I absolutely would not do. 

The hepatitis B for infants is the other one. It’s horrific. It’s horrible. I would absolutely not give that infants unless birth mother has hepatitis B.

Finally the one I absolutely would not do is a multi-dose flu shot. The multi-dose flu shot still has 25 micrograms of mercury. 25 micrograms of mercury is a horrendously large dose. Mercury is one of the most toxic substances on the Earth and we’re still injecting it. Ninety percent of the flu shots in the world are multi-dose vials. They’re even recommending the flu shot for pregnancy, and of course in countries where they can’t afford the single-dose vials these pregnant moms are being given a huge dose mercury. It just defies common sense.

Let me walk you through the infant schedule because this is basically what you pointed out The Vaccine Friendly Plan and basically I want to walk you through my thinking in 2008 when I started integrated pediatrics and I wanted to offer patients a safer way of vaccinating. I’m not pro vaccine or anti-vaccine. I’m just pro-science and I want people to make informed decisions, what’s called informed consent. Sadly in our country we’ve got this move to mandate vaccines removing the whole process of informed consent which basically in my opinion removes the need for doctors. You can just go to a pharmacist, which actually is starting to happen now across the country. Pharmacists are giving vaccines. The whole process of getting information and weighing risks and benefits and actually doing what we need to do in this century which is individualized medicine that’s all out the window when you just have a one-size-fits-all program. I’m sure we’ll get to individualize medicine before we’re done talking. 

Let’s quickly run through the other infant vaccines. You’ve got a brand-new baby. They want to give the hep B in the hospital. Just say no as long as you don’t have hepatitis B if you’re the birth mother. Then you get to your two month visit and there are six vaccines being given to most babies in America. The second hep B, refuse it. There’s no need. It’s a huge dose of aluminum. Polio, there’s no polio in America. The last case acquired here in the United States was in 1979. You don’t need it period. I’m not that scared of the vaccine but you just don’t need it. We want to do a program that minimizes the total push on the immune system because infants have a very immature immune system that’s trying to develop a sense of self and foreign. We know that that’s not a good time to over stress the immune system. You can wait on hep B. You can wait on polio. 

I’m not a fan of the rotavirus. In fact that would that would fall in the category of vaccines I just don’t give. It’s a live virus vaccine. The vaccines are contaminated with virus particles that they can’t get out of the supply because it’s in the system. If you live in a place where you can get to a hospital for IV fluids, worst-case scenario with rotavirus infection might get so dehydrated from vomiting and diarrhea that you need IV fluids, then you go to the hospital. As a busy pediatrician, I had one kid in the last 10 years need IV fluids and it was actually a big kid like school age. It was an odd case. That just is an unnecessary vaccine.

This leaves us with the three that I do recommend if you don’t have strong family history of risk factors that might cause you to be more vulnerable to vaccine damage. Just briefly those risk factors would be autism, severe autoimmune issues, MTHFR defects. Actually, Doctor, you’re the expert on single nucleotide polymorphisms and I look forward to your input as you further define—I know you’re working on this—how we can select out those people who are at greatest risk and maybe just say they shouldn’t be vaccinated. They just can’t tolerate either the immune load or the toxic load. But if you’re genetically pretty sound, your family history is pretty good, you can probably tolerate these three. These are the ones we do it on The Vaccine Friendly Plan for infants. At two months I do the TDAP. That’s tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis. Mind you, there’s only a handful of cases of tetanus in the entire country out of four million births each year. So it’s not for that we’re doing it. There’s no diphtheria. I think we have one case every other year in the US. It’s the pertussis.

Now here’s the dilemma with pertussis. The vaccine is imperfect when we went to the acellular vaccine back in the I think it was the early 90s, 91 maybe, it seemed to be working. But over the years, especially the last few years, the pertussis organism is changing. It’s adapting to the environmental stress that it’s facing maybe because of the vaccines and the vaccines are becoming less effective. That’s one problem with our TDAP. 

The other problem is that vaccine has a lot of aluminum, and depending on the brand it may have more aluminum than another brand. That’s just something one might consider here if you have the option. To be real honest with you though, your pediatrician can only afford to order one kind and that’s the only kind they have and they have to order them in packs of 10 or so. It’s very, very difficult for your pediatrician to special order for you. I just throw that out there. But that vaccine, because the pertussis vaccine provides some protection, I think it still might be worth doing if you have a safe family history. Then there’s two meningitis vaccines, the Hib, which is a haemophilus influenza type b. There is one brand that does not have any aluminum or mercury. That’s the brand I like to use. It’s interesting you actually need to give it with the TDAP because it has no alumina if you use that brand, and you were to give it just by itself as the first vaccine it probably wouldn’t work. I’ve spoken with immunologists who really understand this and they say you need that adjuvant, you need that aluminum for it to be effective. We do the TDAP and the HIB at two months and I postpone the Prevnar. That’s for the pneumococcus. We used to have a Prevnar 7 that was genetic drift and different strains of pneumococcus were starting to cause most of the meningitis and the serious infections. They came out with the Prevnar 13. That’s the vaccine we currently have. It is definitely reducing meningitis and serious disease. 

Even though those numbers are also fairly small, here’s the hard part as a pediatrician. Say you’re my patient and you come in with your baby and we’re having this discussion. I’m going to say, “You know Ben, the chances of your child getting pneumococcal meningitis and having brain damage is pretty low. It might be one in a 100,000. It may even be a little less than that. But can you live with that risk if your child, your infant ends up being one of those rare cases?” I have lots of parents who say, “Yeah I can live with that risk. I don’t want to take the risk of injecting all that aluminum” because the Prevnar also has alumina. That’s the reason I do the TDAP and Hib at two months because the TDAP has aluminum. We move the Prevnar at three months because I don’t want to double up on a toxin for one thing. It also is helpful not to do too many things at once. That way if you have an allergic reaction, you know what caused it.

In The Vaccine Friendly Plan, kids are getting the TDAP and Hib at two months, four months, six months. They’re getting the Prevnar at three, five, and seven months or three, five, and nine months. At a year you do the final boosters for the meningitis ones. The Hib and the Prevnar and you’re done. I do not recommend the MMR at a year for its own special issues that it seems to be having with triggering autism in some subgroup of susceptible children. I think the chickenpox is also better done later. That’s a whole different topic. We could probably do a full podcast on just that. I’m not a fan of the hep A, at least certainly not that young. It’s another aluminum containing vaccine and it seems to be very immunogenic, so I think it has its own problems with over-stimulating the immune system. Honestly as a busy pediatrician, ask me how many cases of hep A I’ve seen in my career. None. Hep A for adults can be a serious illness. It just is not a serious illness for kids. Have I had kids in my practice who probably had hep A? I bet I have. They had cold-like symptoms, flu-like symptoms and we passed it off as the flu. But they never developed a severe liver involvement with the jaundice and they recover perfectly. They probably develop a nice immunity naturally.

Dr. Ben: Tell the listeners how people typically get hep A.

Dr. Paul: Hep A is the one you catch from food. Hep B was that sexually transmitted blood product, IV needles sharing. Hep A is the one that you can get a restaurant when you go into the restaurant and you see in the bathroom it says, “Health workers, wash your hands twice before you go back to work,” that’s because it’s fecal-oral. If I have hep A and I’m a preparing your food in a restaurant, I go use the toilet number two and I don’t wipe real carefully and then I forget to wash my hands, I’ve got hep A in my hands. I go prepare your food and now you’ve got it in your salad or whatever you’re eating. Cooking destroys hep A, so you’re going to catch it from fresh foods, uncooked foods and especially if the handler of that food has had hep A, which is if you’re buying salad makings in the store, you better watch it well at least because you’re not going to cook it. It’s a salad right.

Dr. Ben: The schedule is, I mean you’ve seen it increase dramatically over the years and you mentioned also you saw the hep B move from a young adult to basically a newborn. So that’s a huge shift. You basically narrow down The Vaccine Friendly Plan. You’ve got it down to six vaccines the first year, five?

Dr. Paul: You’re doing the TDAP, Prevnar, and Hib webinar and you’re doing multiple times. It’s those three vaccines but the TDAP is 3 in 1.

Dr. Ben: What are you seeing in your patients now? Are you seeing any kids? Are you looking at your chart normal history and then your patient comes in for a follow-up and they’re staring at the wall and they’re not receptive to you? What are you seeing with this adjustment?

Dr. Paul: So the exciting news to report and it is in my book. I’m trying to get the research published. I got an institutional review board, an IRB approval and look at the data. I started a data set in starting when I opened my clinic in 2008 and I closed it off in February of 2015. That data set includes a little over a thousand patients who chose to vaccinate according to The Vaccine Friendly Plan. For the viewers I should tell you that I’m real clear with my patients. I say, “Here’s what we’re supposed to do. This is the CDC schedule. Here’s what I would do if it was my kid.” Then I explain just as we’ve talked here why. It’s always the patient’s decision what to do. I’m not telling them you got to do The Vaccine Friendly Plan. But once informed, it’s very interesting how people use common sense.

We have over a thousand patients in what I’ll call Group 1 which is The Vaccine Friendly Plan approach. No new autism, no new autism spectrum. We have 238 patients in this in this data set who did no vaccine. There was no new autism, no new autism spectrum. We had almost 900 patients who are more heavily vaccinated. Unfortunately it’s a hodgepodge of patients because some of them would join my practice after starting to do some vaccines. They got kind of skittish about that and they wanted to do it slower. some of them got hepatitis B in the hospital as a newborn which is not part of my plan and I don’t want that in my Group 1. But we had 15 cases of autism or autism spectrum out of that roughly 900. It was a rate of about one in 60 with autism or autism spectrum which is the going rate today in America.

Dr. Ben: Yes it is.

Dr. Paul: So it probably is real. Now the other findings which are… What I did in this study is we did a thorough chart review. We looked at every single visit and tabulated things like sick visits, the numbers of hospitalizations, ER visits for respiratory illness, visits for diarrhea vomiting, those sorts of things, developmental delays of any kind. A couple of the really impressive findings were the hepatitis b vaccine was very highly correlated with autism. The rotavirus vaccine actually caused more trouble than it prevented. Those kids were by far the sickest with more visits from vomiting and diarrhea, more ER visits for vomiting and diarrhea the hospitalizations was awash.

The other finding, which this just speaks to the need for more research, the unvaccinated group by far had the fewest developmental delays. Even The Vaccine Friendly Plan approach, my slower approach had more developmental delays almost double what was seen in the unvaccinated group. Because my own vaccinated group was 238 patients. It’s not a huge group that we need more data. What I’m going to be curious to see over the years when I cut that study off in February of 2015, the oldest kids weren’t yet teenagers. It’s very interesting as a busy pediatrician what I’m seeing in the teenage population is just an explosion of anxiety and depression, ADD, ADHD, learning problems and it will be very interesting to see if the unvaccinated in the slower vaccine group do much better in those areas. I suspect they will.

Dr. Ben: That’s fantastic at the IRB. That’s a big deal. Thank you for going through that because I know it’s not easy.

Dr. Paul: The harder deal is getting it published.

Dr. Ben: Well at least we have some complementary medicine journals out there that are pretty well respected. At least you can start there. Hopefully plus one will look at it. The unvaccinated group, what are they like? What’s their lifestyle, their mindset, their environment? I mean you have to be a certain type of individual and family to say we’re going to go completely unvaccinated. I’ve got my youngest boy completely unvaccinated. My oldest boy has got everything under the sun. My oldest boy was born first year first quarter in med school. I was like you. I grew up in a standard medical family. My mother is a retired obstetrician from Portland. Everything was standardized for me. 

I had vaccines as a kid. I just kind of fell in that mold and I vaccinated my boy with everything. My second son was born three years later. I had some training under my belt and I was like you know what? We’re going to Russia, you’re an infant, I need to get you some diphtheria. It was during that seasonal time where it’s running a risk. We removed the pertussis and it was a special shot ordered. That’s all he had. My third boy had nothing. If I vaccinated my second and third boy, I think we would have some real problems because their genetics are a dirty mess. They’re not good. Thankfully my oldest son that boy he’s got a pretty good looking clean slate from what I’ve seen so far. I’m still studying some other SNPs, but for the most part MTHFR he doesn’t have. My other two boys do. He’s very fortunate.

My family is pretty rigid. We’re gluten-free. We’re dairy-free, fully environmental conscious. I don’t have pesticides, herbicides in my yard. I have a garage. Old owner. He moved out. He goes, “Do you want my big thing around up a couple hundred bucks worth?” I was like “Get it out of here.” Convincing my neighbors on both sides to go the same route. What are your patients like who are in this unvaccinated group and how are they staying healthy?

Dr. Paul: Well congratulations on waking up as fast as you did. You probably did save your younger two kids. I wasn’t as fast. For viewers, if you’ve done a certain thing because you thought that was what you were supposed to do, don’t beat yourself up. I mean it is what it is, and when we know better, we do better. It’s as simple as that. I have a very large growing population of families who have been kicked out of other practices or who are seeking me out now that the book’s out and they’ve realized there’s a doctor who’s going to honor informed consent. 

So the interesting thing is most of my patients who don’t vaccinate are in the highest educated group. We’ve got several families that have moved to California because of the mandate law there. Their kids can go to school or daycare in California without all the vaccines so they’ve just moved to Oregon. These tend to be highly educated families. They probably aren’t quite as clean and their diet as you are but some of them are. There’s a subset who are really conscientious about eating organic and real food and staying away from pesticides and herbicides, other toxins to avoid. One is acetaminophen. It is just a horrible toxin. Some studies linking it to autism and definitely just totally destroys your ability to get rid of other toxins. It magnifies toxins. Flame retardants, that’s another horrible one. You got this brand-new baby and then you put them right on a brand-new mattress that’s off-gassing flame retardants. Those are some other examples. In general I’d say perhaps there’s a higher likelihood that my non-vacc families are also doing other things right. That may be contributing as well to the lower rate of autism and lower rate of problems.

Dr. Ben: Such as utilizing Vitamin D.

Dr. Paul: Yep. So actually everybody in my practice gets told about Vitamin D from the get-go. If I have a prenatal visit, I’m getting those pregnant moms on high-dose Vitamin D 5000 IU’s a day while pregnant. I actually recommend your vitamin. I think your prenatal is superior. Seeking Health I’ve got bottles in my office right now, and then right at newborn I think we need to start with Vitamin D support. It’s so important. Everybody is so deficient. We’ve got ample studies showing how low Vitamin D affects your immune system. It affects your ability to get rid of toxins. It sets you up with cancer risk. It goes on and on.

Dr. Ben: Yeah it does and there’s even a paper published by Bruce Aims and another lady. I’m forgetting her name. But there is something that has to do with Vitamin D and serotonin binding. A lot of autistic children will have high levels of serotonin in their blood but they’ll have low serotonin their CNS. So you’re doing organic acids or blood tests. You’re like it’s fine but really in CNS it’s a problem. Vitamin D is supposedly useful and I’m still studying that. That’s great to hear that these people are increasing in numbers. I agree if you had vaccinated like I did or you do something in the past where you thought it was the right choice, you cannot beat yourself up over it. I mean you did what you knew was best and life is a continuous journey. We’re always seeking to improve where we should be. If you’re listening to this, you’re seeking to improve so thank you for doing that.

I’m going to reference that Jama HPV study. You can look for that in PubMed. If you have it, can you just please shoot that over to me? I can’t find that sentence. That’s really important. If a person is vaccine-injured, what are you working with? Are you working with this population too? Are you getting any success?

Dr. Paul: Absolutely I work with this population. It’s interesting when you use the term vaccine-injured, the mainstream folks, I think the hair on their back of their neck goes up.

Dr. Ben: Yeah I would think so.

Dr. Paul: they don’t recognize most of the injuries. It takes doctors who have become more aware to the full extent of problems that might be vaccine-caused. I should clarify it’s toxins, toxins, toxins. And then vaccines is oftentimes that’s that last straw right because you get the huge exposure in the womb. The uterus is shunting nutrients and toxins. Then you start hammering away with vaccines, and on top of that you’re not eating right you’re not getting your nutrients. It’s a whole big perfect storm.

Dr. Ben: You’ve got preconception issues and you’ve got pregnancy issues. You’ve got nutritional deficiencies. You have exposure to the environment. You got the new mattress. You got stress in the home. You get the vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Now you’re a storm.

Dr. Paul: Recovering those kids as what you’re asking is tough. It’s really tough. I’ve had some huge successes. Sometimes you just get lucky and something as simple as gluten-free diet, gluten-free casein- free diet. I’ve had a handful of kids who were nonverbal, no eye contact start speaking. When that happens, it’s like hallelujah but it’s rare. So for most families, it takes a really dedicated journey of cleaning up the diet, getting rid of the toxins, don’t do any more vaccines. You got to stop putting toxins into the bucket and then you’ve got to help get rid of it. It’s about assisting with detox pathways, with nutritional support, supplements. I’ve had a handful who improved with B12 shots so sometimes that’s worth trying. I’m not a IV chelator. I know there are doctors who do that. I was about to venture into that world and the story was I was I was doing provoked urines with the MSA and and just trying to see how much toxin was in a child. It was actually my own child and he went blank for two months. It was like just that much provocation caused enough toxins to start circulating again which made me a little gun-shy of doing IV chelation. But yeah there there’s a lot going on that one can do to help children.

Dr. Ben: When you say it’s rare that they improve from ones having significant symptoms, what is that rate in your practice? What are you seeing? What’s your success rate with a person who was fine or they come in new as a patient and they have symptoms like autism?

Dr. Paul: The problem is that term autism it includes kids who are just a little glitch. They’re kind of maybe socially awkward or they’ve got a lot of little sensitivities but they’re doing fine in school and their language is fine all the way to severely anxious, flapping, no eye contact.

Here’s what I can say. Almost universally we get progress whether you get all the way to what you would say completely symptom-free that depends how severe you started for one thing. A lot of times you’ll still hear stories in the media of people who recovered their kids and it’s like so wonderful. I’ve got friends with severely autistic kids who’ve had progress but they’re still struggling. These kids are probably not going to be able to live independently and that’s part of the tragedy that might have been preventable. That’s why you and I are talking because we want people… Prevention is so much more important and effective than the hard work of recovering a kid once we’ve done damage.

Dr. Ben: That’s right. If your cup is overflowing I tell patients all the time a lot of people will say “I’ve got this, I got that” and they want to take a supplement for it. “I’ve got MTHFR.” They take methylfolate. They got children with autism. They want the magic pills. What I have come to learn after years of progression is that the first step is removal and prevention. You don’t want to continue adding to the pot because if you’re adding DMSA or a chelator for heavy metals to a otherwise toxic soup, then you can have problems. If you’re adding methylfolate to an individual without removing gluten and dairy and other things, you can have a problem. You can increase excitation. 

I think a lot of people have to start thinking what is it that I can remove rather than say what can I add. That seems to be the biggest thing that I’m finding to be the simplest easiest recommendation but it’s still hard because identifying things to remove when you think everything is fine is very difficult.

Dr. Paul: As we all know, lifestyle changes are the hardest. One of one of my severely autistic kids who was one of those kids that regressed I finally convinced them to go gluten-free and dairy-free and he came back two months later he had been nonverbal no eye contact. He says, “Dr. Thomas, my Thomas choo-choo.” I got goosebumps like oh my gosh. Today this kid is I think he’s around 13 and he’s fairly nonverbal. What happened was they couldn’t maintain that really structured strict lifestyle that he required. He was so sensitive and so vulnerable to gluten or other toxins it became too much.

Dr. Ben: The other thing with that is oh yeah most of the time we don’t eat gluten. I only have gluten once a week or with dinner. With gluten it’s either 100 percent or 0 percent.

Dr. Paul: I have a story to amplify that. A different kid who had regressed and was nonverbal one of those ones who responded and became verbal went to a Thanksgiving family gathering, got his hands on a few cookies, he lost speech for a month. One episode of eating cookies.

Dr. Ben: Please if you’re listening, I hope you still are, it’s 100 percent gluten-free. There is no 80 percent or 90 percent. I will say I am 100 percent gluten-free and so is my family. If I can do it, you can do it. It’s very possible. Stores nowadays have a plethora of gluten-free alternative breads, cereals, grains, pastas treats so your kid doesn’t feel left out or you don’t feel left out a party. My children’s teachers have a stash—my younger kids, not my teenagers anymore—in their classroom so if there’s a party, the teacher will bring out cookies for my child and sometimes he will share them and the other kids will like them over the brownies that they were being brought in. It’s very possible, so I highly, highly encourage you to do that.

Dr. Paul: The patients who are struggling with this, I’ve struggled with it. I’m not quite as good as Dr. Ben here and I’m one of those 99.9 percenters and then every once in a while I just “Ugh.” I’m not successful, and for me it doesn’t cause me any harm so I can get away with that. But you just keep trying. Don’t give up because you tried and failed once. You’re trying to make a lifestyle change. You just keep working at it and eventually you’re going to get it.

Dr. Ben: That’s right. That’s a great point because was for me it was early 2000s. I grew up eating wheat and dairy and corn and processed foods and garbage. I was formula-fed. I wasn’t breastfed and I was taking antibiotics and Flagyl. I did the whole gamut and I had a history to reflect that. It was a journey for me to get back to where I am now, get to where I am. I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been, knock on wood. But it was the early 2000s where I had this really bright burnt tip on the end of my tongue and it would only happen when I ate. I was in med school, highly stressful. I was in cadaver lab full of exposures. I was pretty poor because I wasn’t working. I was on student loan so my diet wasn’t good. Man, I got gluten-intolerant big time during school.

Dr. Paul: Interesting.

Dr. Ben: In fact I was the poster child for geographic tongue.

Dr. Paul: Interesting. You can educate me here. Do you think geographic tongue is like equals gluten problem?

Dr. Ben: I think geographic tongue equals a plethora. It’s like autistic autism spectrum, geographic tongue spectrum. It can be any food allergen, any food intolerance. It could be digestive dysfunctions. It could be nutrient deficiencies. I eliminate the gluten. My red tip went away but I still had the patches. Then I added a multivitamin, improve more, reduce my stress, improve more. I would have white coating, yellow, green. It was gnarly. It’s really bad. Checking your kid’s tongue and your own tongue is actually a very quick way to see your exposures too.

We discussed a lot of actionable stuff here. Your book is going to be way more detailed and it’s available at Amazon I assume.

Dr. Paul: Absolutely.

Dr. Ben: I’ll have the link below for the listeners. What is something that you really want to share that we haven’t discussed yet?

Dr. Paul: Well I don’t know if we’ve stressed enough the importance. The way I set up The Vaccine Friendly Plan, this book, the first chapter is on toxins because I think that’s 90 percent of the problem. Getting that education, realizing that there are a lot of toxic things that you can do something about, that’s key. The next chapter is probably the thing I want to touch on that that is just so important and that’s pregnancy because if you can get it right during pregnancy… there we go. We’ve got a table of contents. Pregnancy is Chapter 2. Protecting your baby before birth, that is just so important. I go through just some simple things you can do including avoiding acetaminophen and stressing over and over again please do not get vaccines while you’re pregnant. It is absolutely untested you. What’s happened there is the manufacturers of the vaccines say right on the package insert “Not tested in pregnancy.” You go to the CDC or the FDA and they say, “No this testing needs to be done by the manufacturers.” And yet they’re recommending these vaccines. They’re now recommending a flu shot sometimes twice. If your pregnancy overlaps two seasons, you’ll actually be encouraged to do two different flu shots and the TDAP, and they’re pushing it just like they’re pushing the HPV. It is absolutely insane to inject aluminum while you’re pregnant when we know this is a neurotoxin and we know it’s an adjuvant that messes with the immune system. 

I really like to stress that and I have to re-emphasize for newborns if you, the birth mother, does not have hepatitis B and you’re having a hospital birth, let me warn you about what’s going to happen. You go in and you sign in to have that baby. You are giving them permission to do routine care. Routine care looks like this. You’ve just delivered your baby and you’re just in that kind of lala land of having delivered. You’ll have a few minutes hopefully of skin to skin time with birth mom and the nurses come in and whisk that baby over to the warmer, dry the baby off, and before you know it bam bam, hepatitis B and vitamin K and eye ointment. We could spend time on the vitamin K and eye ointment but I want to focus on the hep B. It is a really big mistake. You need to put it in your birth plan. You need to have your the dad or the partner whoever’s with you stand guard and reminds that nurse and you tell every single nurse in that hospital you’re not doing hep B. Give them a copy of my book if you have to, but don’t do hep B for newborns. It’s insanity.

Dr. Ben: Stand guard.

Dr. Paul: Stand guard. More times than not I’ve had moms come back and say, “Well they did in the middle of the night while we were sleeping.” I go “What are you talking about? Didn’t you tell them?” “Yeah we told them.” Well, the night nurse comes on, looks on the chart. It’s a standing order, realize this, it’s a standing order in hospitals. A really good nurse, oh they forgot to do the hep B. She doesn’t know your birth plan. You’re asleep. She goes in and gives it. Don’t let your baby out of your sight. Make sure every single nurse knows you are not wanting that vaccine.

Dr. Ben: Right. Just because it’s in your birth plan, just because you told a few nurses doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

Dr. Paul: You can even put a big sign across the bassinet “No hep B.” That way if the baby happens to be sleeping in the bassinet and they come, they’re going to see that.

Dr. Ben: That’s brilliant. Great point, great point. With MTHFR, two of my boys have it and there’s no need for my oldest to get nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide during delivery or dental treatment is really, really harmful for methylation. It’s very harmful. It destroys Vitamin B12. It oxidizes it. I highly recommend birthing moms not to use nitrous oxide. I told my own personal dentist for my kids put in your chart note “no nitrous oxide.” Well, my boys came home. I said, “Did you get the funny mask?” “Yeah.” I got lit. I knew what nutrients. He needed liposomal glutathione and methylcobalamin, gave it to them both immediately. That happens to you, nitrous oxide at birth, do that. It’s a must. But refuse nitrous oxide too.

Dr. Paul: You know, Ben, what we didn’t touch on which I would just like to at least if we’re getting near the end—your viewers probably know this—but you’re the guru for single nucleotide polymorphisms. I think you call them dirty genes now. I’ve learned from you. I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve been at two or three of your conferences where you spoke. You are the best educator out there for people, for doctors, for parents on these sorts of topics. I know you have a website where people can actually buy your videos and buy your trainings, and I would encourage people to do that. This is where medicine needs to go, personalized medicine so that you can have a plan whether you’re going to vaccinate or not. You go in with knowledge. I’ve got these risk factors; therefore, I need to do this, this, and this to you know mitigate the problem first of all and I cannot do this whether it’s vaccines or eating gluten or whatever it might be. I’m very excited to learn more from you. I know you’re doing some important work in the area of single nucleotide polymorphism. So thank you.

Dr. Ben: I appreciate that. Thank you and. We’ve got an IRB as well looking at some SNPs and specific nutrients that should and should not be used for them and trial is underway as we speak. That will be published. We’ve done some preliminary trials on it and the evidence is showing what we assumed. It’s going to turn a lot of people’s heads. 

Dr. Paul: Terrific.

Dr. Ben: Well, thanks for your time, Paul. Phenomenal information. I’m sure people are going to get a lot— well I know they will get a lot of great data and your book as well. It’s a must-read for folks so you can find the link below. At the end of this video too there will be a link for Dr. Thomas’ book. If you’re looking for a phenomenal doctor in Portland, Oregon, you’re staring at him. 

Dr. Paul: Thanks, Ben. I appreciate all you’re doing to further the health of children and adults, all of us.

Dr. Ben: Like you said, prevention is worth an ounce of cure.

Dr. Paul: Absolutely.

Dr. Ben: Thank you, sir.

Dr. Paul: Thank you for watching.

Dr. Ben: Bye.

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