.

As I said, I'm going to invite Dr. Shiva to join us, and he's already available. I'm going to put him right on. Dr. Shiva, coming at you. Dr. Shiva, can you hear me?

I can hear you. Good morning.

I'm amazing, and thank you so much for joining us. So I'm going to give, for those few people watching this who don't already know you—most of my audience already knows you—but let me give you just a quick bio. So Dr. Shiva has four degrees from MIT, including a bachelor's in electrical engineering and computer science, a dual master's degree in mechanical engineering and visual studies from the MIT Media Lab, and then he also returned to MIT to complete his doctoral work in systems biology within the Department of Biological Engineering. And that's where he developed Cytosolve, a scalable computational platform for modeling cell dynamic integration of molecular pathway models, which is awkward because I do that in my spare time. I didn't realize, Dr. Shiva, I didn't know you needed a whole company just to develop scalable computational platforms for modeling the cell dynamic integration of molecular pathways, but apparently you do. Barely. You're doing it the hard way. Yeah, just kidding.

So you're the CEO now of Cytosolve?

Yes.

And I'm sorry, it's Cytosolve. Cytosolve is like cyto means cell and solve means solving it. See what I do? Solve. Yep, Cytosolve. And that company looks for multi-combinational drug opportunities.

Yeah, it's just very quickly, just leading with my background, Scott. You know you've talked about my technology stack. This is sort of the sweet spot. It's the integration of computing and biology. In 2003, Scott, what happened was when the genome project ended, it turns out human beings only have 20,000 genes. We don't have a half a million the same as a worm. So it was a big inflection point in biology. It flipped biology on its head. So we recognized that we need to move out of the nucleus and actually start understanding all the very powerful chemical reactions that take place in the cell.

So in 2003 the National Science Foundation put forward this grand challenge: could someone model the whole cell? So think about the cell as a bag of chemical reactions. We know pieces of those chemical reactions that are being published in the literature. Could you extract those and imagine building—it's like reverse engineering the whole body. So that's the challenge I took on. I came back to MIT. During 2003 to 2007, Scott, the approach I took was not a biology approach and not an AI computer science approach, which is just fitting lines to curves. I said this is an engineering systems problem.

Biologists are essentially little knowledge engineers working in their little silos. They're finding little pieces of the puzzle, and these puzzle pieces are diagrams, you know, like the little John Madden diagrams: A plus B gives C, like the Monday Night Football diagrams, right? They're called pathways. And some of those pathways in 2003 were becoming predictive models. So if you could interconnect those models, we could technically use the computer long before we kill the animals, long before we did stuff in humans, to model biological mechanisms. This is how we build airplanes, right? We don't just fly airplanes and kill ourselves. We don't put monkeys in them. We do it on the computer.

So that's what I did, Scott. It was one of my big personal goals because I was very interested in understanding how to do drug combinations. I grew up in India watching my grandmother as a village healer do these combinations. So this to me was a 40-year quest. Cytosolve emerged out of that. And then between 2007 and 2012, my advisor and I at MIT spent a lot of time proving this. We published in Nature and Science, Nature Neuroscience. So Cytosolve is really an engine for understanding molecular mechanisms before we go to kill animals. This reduces risk.

For the laypeople, could we imagine what you're doing sort of like seeing the cell as a machine and trying to figure out what the parts are so that you can predict how the machine will act in any exact state?

Yeah. So basically, typically in engineering we do forward engineering. I want to go build an airplane. I build the parts, put it together. Biology is quite interesting. We don't know the parts. Nature, if you believe in evolution, did that over many, many billions of years. The individual biologists are finding parts. What's called reductionism. They're finding pieces. I, coming as a systems biologist, am trying to connect the parts to get an understanding of how nature put this together. And if we can understand how the ankle bone is connected to the foot bone, we now get a mechanistic understanding, which means it's a very powerful platform for drug development. So we can develop stuff faster and cheaper so we're not throwing stuff at the wall. That's what it's all about.

So when you talk about technologies that can—I've spoken before about like the postal service and climate change, but this is like what I do for a living for the last 30, 40 years. So you're such the perfect example of what I call a talent stack, where you've combined exactly the right types of skills so that you just have a vision that somebody who doesn't have the same combination of experiences and background and education just wouldn't see. So you're combining, like you said, an engineer's mindset with the medical mindset to get something that's better than both.

So now take us to vaccinations. You said you're not an anti-vaxxer. Let me say from the audience I'm not an anti-vaxxer because I haven't looked into it. I don't know. If I looked into it I would have a different opinion. But tell us, let's start with what do you think the public understands about the issue of requiring vaccinations and where we are there. Let's start with what we get wrong.

Yeah. So I think what we get wrong, and this unfortunate split that unfortunately seems to occur, quote unquote left, quote unquote right, anti-vax, vax, has really occurred because for whatever reason we don't go at the deep, deep issue. And the real issue is about the scientific method. The scientific method is about you have a hypothesis, you do testing, you get results from that test, you have an understanding of what you've figured out, and you go back and test it. It's a recognition we have deep respect that we don't know a lot of stuff right now.

When you say test, you're specifically saying double-blind?

Yeah. Well in biology, and by the way it's called double-blind placebo-controlled studies, and I'll explain what that is. You've made a very important point, Scott, about medicine and engineering. Just as an aside, in 2003 MIT created a department called biological engineering, not biomedical, because they felt as new discoveries were coming in biology we needed to take an engineer's mindset to understand biology, not a device. So biological engineering was a completely new department set up from scratch. So the vision of modern science, whether you talk to Francis Collins at the NIH, is that we need to use engineering principles to understand biology.

Part of those engineering principles is I build something, I put it out there. I mean, you build software. If it doesn't work you listen to your customers. You got to go figure it out. If even one customer is upset you go figure it out. But as this mindset of I put something out there, I got to figure it out. Now when it comes to vaccines or drug development, the historical process is you do some testing in a test tube and you hope because you do that hopefully you're not killing too many things. Then you go into an animal and you test your stuff there and you test for toxicity and efficacy.

In the area of medical drug development there's two axes, Scott. Does it work and is it safe? The Food and Drug Administration is truly concerned about safety, not really efficacy. They want to make sure you're not killing people. And by the way, they're certainly concerned with efficacy because it has to have some.

Yes, yes, yes. You know there's a whole discussion here how some stuff gets through. But the issue is efficacy is secondary. Toxicity is a fundamental thing the FDA is focused on. Right when it comes to vaccines, let's look at the history of it. You know it's fascinating because whenever you say modern medicine, what's the first thing that comes to people's mind? Polio. Polio vaccine. Oh my God. You know it's almost you can put the words modern medicine, Jonas Salk, and polio as the three pillars of the wonderful thing that came out of modern medicine.

What's fascinating is when Jonas Salk was creating the polio vaccine he wrote an imploring letter saying that he was against double-blind studies. Okay, fast forward. Why? Yeah, I just found this in this effort to really, you know, I went back and actually read the original, the actual results of the polio thing. And Jonas Salk makes this imploring letter saying all we need to do is show efficacy. So when you give a vaccine to someone the body will create antibodies, right, because you're giving an exogenous or a foreign body and the body creates antibodies. And his view is as long as it creates antibodies everyone should be happy because polio is killing children. We need to just make sure the antibodies are created.

He was against double-blind control studies and you can read his letter that he wrote at that time to the National Vaccine Institute. So what was he against them? Because he didn't want to wait around. He wanted to get rid of polio.

Yeah, yeah, it's that exactly. So let's give him—I'm not going to put any conspiracy theories here. It's basically he was more focused on let's get this out, let's save people's lives. These are kids' lives. We got to get it out there. But I want to give the original context. One of the great wins of modern medicine was polio and the man behind it, Jonas Salk, who's revered, was not for double-blind placebo-controlled studies.

After the polio vaccine was given in 1954-1955, everyone can look this up, called the Cutter incident, where Cutter and Wyeth gave one set of the polio virus—you actually deactivate the polio virus, Scott—it wasn't fully deactivated and was given to 400,000 people and about 250 to 300 of those people actually got the paralysis. Wow. This was after the fact. So why do I bring that up? My point is Salk, polio, this huge victory for medicine. Efficacy was always the goal. Safety was in the background. Right. And again not against vaccines. I just want to say where the emphasis was.

In that line you go now to drug development separate from vaccines. You know you're building out on Lipitor, all these different drugs. The modern process of drug development, if you go to clinicaltrials.gov, there's a huge focus on double-blind control studies. You have to make it safe. That's why you go to phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. There's this huge emphasis in drug development on safety. And in that field the biggest development there, Scott, has been the recognition, oh my God, we're creating drugs that take five billion dollars, roughly one to five billion dollars, 13 years, and what comes out of that process has lots and lots of side effects.

Most of those drugs were developed for a single—not for you Scott Adams or me, Shiva. They were developed for a statistical blob of people, let's say with some cancer or some cardiovascular issue. So most of those drugs coming out have side effects. So that's when you watch your commercial they'll say by the way this could do this and this could do this. That's why I turn off those commercials. They're too sad. They're very sad.

Let me jump in just for a fact check here. When I was in my 20s I signed up for a drug trial. Details don't matter but I turned out to be in the placebo group. Now was there any reason why they tested that particular med? Years ago with a—I believe it was a double-blind. I only knew I was in the placebo group after they said it's obvious you're in the placebo group because it's working for everybody else. They actually ended the test. Because single-blind would be where you didn't know and the doctors did. Double-blind is you don't know and the doctors don't know who got what and it's just data that they get, anonymized data. Then they have to do correlations to figure it out. So if you knew after, it definitely was a single blind and potentially a double blind.

In 2003 in particular the reason MIT set up the Department of Biological Engineering is—and other institutions got into this field called systems biology—this is 21st century medicine. They recognized that drugs, one size does not fit all, that we need to take a personalized precision medicine approach. In fact Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, in fact when Obama was there he called it the future of medicine: precision medicine. So what that means is that we need to find the right medicine for the right person at the right time. This is the future. And therefore that's why people said let's start using the computer, let's reduce risk. So reduction of risk, creating drugs that work for Scott Adams. Let's say you have the same disease I do, you may get a different drug than I should. Right medicine for the right person at the right time.

I'm here in Cambridge. Our companies in Cambridge, the center of biotech, all of these guys are buzzing around about right medicine for the right person at the right time. So I'm giving you this background. That's where we are at today. And safety is one of the predominant things here. So when we look at vaccines it's almost like vaccine like stapler man in Office Space. No way.

Let me pause here because you said two things I'm trying to understand together. One is that people are trying to develop specific combinations of drugs for a specific person and the other is you would want double-blind tests for drugs because they have sizes for safety. But wouldn't you have the worst safety potentially trying to make an individual drug for a person? Because by definition that combination has never been tested on that person.

Exactly. Yeah, so you bring up a great point, Scott. So basically there's these two. So on the one hand I think we can all understand one of the goals in any engineering exercise is reduced risk. So you understand what the risk was. The foreign intervention, you know you have bridges. Say hey, hurricanes are affecting one out of 100 bridges falling down. You put some technology to that. The risk that more bridges are falling apart, you say wait a minute, something's wrong here. Maybe this stuff we put in hurt something. But it is all about risk.

You brought up one of the two pillars I want to talk about is risk. Every day we as human beings are making decisions on risk. So you have some calculation of risk before an intervention and some calculation after. And then we as society collectively actually say well do I want to move forward. In that our cars, but there's a personalized risk. The 18-year-old who has 20 DUIs is paying a much higher amount for his car than you or I are.

When it comes to drug development we are dealing with a highly complex system, the human body. There's so many gears in there that we don't fully understand. So the current process is I give something in a test tube. Okay, I don't see any issues. Then I go to animal testing and then you have to get allowance by the FDA to go to what's called clinical testing. Small groups of humans, then larger groups, phase 1, phase 2, big groups, phase 3. So this is how we do it in medicine today.

Although when we get to that biggest group, are you saying that typically with the vaccine there's still not double-blind?

The reality of this we have, and in particular we're talking about just to be specific so we can focus it, is a discussion of childhood vaccines. We're talking about kids. Childhood vaccines. There's 70 doses a kid typically gets. And the vaccines are today not really managed by the Health and Human Services. In 1986 an act was passed when Reagan was there that it basically removed liabilities, very interestingly, away from the pharma companies and basically said that if you had vaccine injury you go to Health and Human Services and they cap the amount of liability or you could get payout. I think it's $250,000. It's called a vaccine court.

In the discussions with HHS, Health and Human Services, they have said things were placebo-controlled. And the discourse has been with them that would you actually look at the vaccines. So I'll give you an example. There are a set of vaccines that are given to kids from birth to six months of life: DTaP, Hep B, Hib, pneumococcal, polio, and combination vaccines. So if you add those up, one, two, it's about eight vaccines. None of them have been placebo-controlled. Not one of them. That means you split the group into two. Some people got saline with nothing in it injected and other people actually got the vaccine. This is just facts. I can put this up if you want. I'll send it to you.

Would you say that none of those vaccines have ever been double-blind placebo?

Nope. No double-blind controlled. Let me repeat that. So babies receive three injections of the following vaccines: DTaP, Hep B, Hib, pneumococcal, polio, and a combination vaccine where they get a bunch of them together. None of them have been double-blind controlled. None of them.

Now after between six months to 18 years of life they get one or two injections of the next set of vaccines: hepatitis A, MMR, varicella, chickenpox, combo vaccine, and flu. None of them have been placebo-controlled tested. None of them.

Can you give me just an idea what the people who say that's a good system, how would they defend not having double-blind placebo tests?

From zero to 18 years of life hepatitis B, the hepatitis vaccine is given to them the day that they're born, Scott. Untested. Now when you go to 18 months and 18 years of life they get one, two, three injections of DTaP, HPV, meningitis, combination, and flu. There's only one vaccine which was double-blind controlled. You know what that one was? Gardasil, HPV.

So I listed 30 vaccines that kids are given from zero to 18. Only one of them was double-blind tested. It gets even better. The interesting thing is if you actually go read the package insert—and I actually went and looked at the clinical study for Gardasil—when they did the double-blind studies you give one group of people the vaccine, the other people get a saline placebo. When they did Gardasil what they did was they gave 10,000 people the actual vaccine. 9,000 people got the saline placebo. Scott, guess what they got? They got the adjuvant. All of these vaccines have an adjuvant called something that carries the vaccine, makes it more effective. In the case of Gardasil it's aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate.

So some people, women, got the vaccine. 9,092 women got what's called the control, not a placebo control. They got a control which included the adjuvant. And then the third group, 320 women, got the saline placebo. When we say placebo we're talking about nothing in it. No, just pure saline.

When they reported the results in the insert it's quite incredible. They found out 2.3% of the people had autoimmune disorders, people who got the vaccine and the control. But no one in the pure saline placebo had any autoimmune disorders. However when they combined the data, when they reported it, they said Gardasil was 2.3% and they said that full 2.3% combined the saline plus the control with the adjuvant group. It's sloppy bad science.

But weren't they being conservative by lumping those two together? Wasn't that the more conservative way to go?

No. In that group it was zero out of 320 got any autoimmune disorders, the people with the saline. But when you combine the true placebo with the less pure not really placebo, that shows you they showed no difference. That's why it got allowed. They said this group was 2.3%, this group was 2.3%. And again the toxicity issue is, is it the aluminum hydroxide which caused that 2.3%? Because clearly the saline had nothing.

So to summarize, 30 different vaccines, only one had double-blind saline placebo controlled, and that one was not truly—they didn't do a clear distinction between the saline and they lumped this together and they said there was no difference. And then on top of all that of course there's been no studies of any combinations of those things given together.

Exactly right. And that's why we created Cytosolve to help with this. But let me go back because we help major companies do combinations, all these supplement companies, because we can understand on the computer.

Now going to your fundamental question, what does the other side say? Why aren't they doing this? Remember I told you Jonas Salk was against doing it. He was feverishly against it. He said this sort of ethos came in medicine which said it's unethical not to give people something if it works. Let me read you from one of the vaccine sites. This is what their issue is. It's called the ethics argument, Scott. Now listen to me and tell me if you can see the incredible tautology here, the chicken and egg. This is how it goes. If there is already a known vaccine that is safe and effective, it is unethical to randomize children into a vaccinated group—which is double-blind control studies—because we would be denying them the benefits of being vaccinated. Oh my God.

Let me suppose I say this. If there is already a known herb that is safe and effective like turmeric, been used in India for thousands of years, it is unethical to randomize people into a group not receiving the herb because we would be denying them the benefits of the herb. Let me give you that. If there is already a known yoga posture that is safe and effective, it is unethical to randomize people into a group not receiving a yoga posture because we would be denying them the benefits of the yoga posture. If there is already a known chiropractic manipulation that is safe and effective, it is unethical to randomize people into a group not receiving the chiropractic manipulation. You see what I'm saying?

The mainstream bow-tie-steamed medical community, which we all are supposed to think they are gods, they have said complementary alternative medicine, turmeric, etc., you got to do double-blind control studies. When it comes to their vaccine, listen to this. If there's already a known vaccine that is safe and effective, how do you know it's safe and effective? It's been used and we're getting the immune antibody response. Of the 30 vaccines none of them have been proven safe and effective. They're saying by their use. And this is how it goes. If a new vaccine comes out that is, let's say there you are Merck and you create the hepatitis vaccine and there's no thing for hepatitis, even according to their own rule of ethics they say in that case that you should test it. Some of the people, what we call the pro-vax people, Health and Human Services says you don't even have to test it in that case.

The bottom line on vaccine safety, vaccine testing, I can tell you as an expert who works with all these guys, it's like stapler man. Remember stapler man in Office Space? It's somehow he got left there. The drug group moved but he's still in the basement. Because we revere Jonas Salk and polio so much, that story, that we have let them get away with less strict standards of double-blind placebo-controlled studies.

Let me play devil's advocate here because I don't have anybody to represent that side so I'll do my best job of it. In the case of polio, would you agree that Jonas Salk has been proven right if we just limited it to that case? That the moral and risk management, based on what they knew at the time, that he made the right call because he probably prevented more people from getting polio than if they'd waited say for however long it took to take the test. Would you say—and before I extend the argument—would you say that's true even though he didn't know he was making the right call? We can look at it in hindsight and say yeah that was probably the right call even though we prefer he had done a double-blind experiment. Would you agree with that or no?

Yes. So Scott what I would agree with is the following. It's a very important question. I went and read the original 1954 paper. They gave them a defining pattern of symptoms of polio. And there's some question about this: what was polio before 1954 and what was polio after 1954? But let's give Jonas Salk for his work. He did great work. We reduced polio. Let's give that. However my point is that safety was not at the forefront of that. And also what is the marker? What is the threshold where collateral damage is okay? 1%, 2%? What's that number that you say we have victory?

Now let me ask you this. What is it we are willing to agree is safe? And that safety discourse needs to occur with vaccines. When you're looking at something like polio the odds of getting polio, yeah that's a pretty bad situation. Let's say the odds of getting one of the lesser mumps or measles. They can still kill people but most people are going to recover. I had those things as a child. So wouldn't you take a completely different risk management approach to how risky it is before you let people have it? You have to separate those, right?

Exactly. In fact in that video that I put up there the entire issue uses these two words: risk management. This entire thing is about engineering risk management. You brought up measles. Why was the measles vaccine created? Someone decided prior to the measles vaccine creation, one out of 100,000 people—I went to the CDC site—about one out of 100,000 people were getting what's called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a simple thing, brain inflammation, deadly brain inflammation. One out of 100,000. So that risk, 0.001%. Someone decided that's too high, therefore we need the measles vaccine.

Wouldn't you say based on what you've said already that we would never be able to tell if we had created more safety than problems because we didn't do the kind of testing that would have surfaced that? So would you summarize to say at least on measles, because it's easy, would it be a safe summary to say that we don't actually know if we're hurting or helping more?

Exactly. We don't know what the baseline is. We don't know where the goalpost is. You hit it on the nail. So recently in a German study, the 0.001% risk of getting SSPE which is brain inflammation was a motivation to create the measles vaccine. Between 2014 and now that number, a German study said one out of 1,700, which means now it's 0.056%. So let's even give that higher number. So again the reason for measles vaccine is justified that people without vaccinations have a risk of 0.056% or 0.001% of getting this horrible brain inflammation.

Now check this out. This is why the mothers are so upset. This is where this is coming from. And I didn't understand it until like this is when I had the epiphanies. After vaccinations people are getting what's called autism, defined by—it's scientifically defined by a particular marker called the HMGB1 inflammatory marker which comes out in what's called autism spectrum disorder. It's an actual biological marker which is associated with neural inflammation, the same neural inflammation similar to SSPE.

Wait, hold on. Are you telling me that to be on the autism spectrum that's not genetic? There's a lifestyle component?

Well, it's a marker which could—remember we have a spectrum, genetic, non-genetic. But there is an inflammatory marker which is associated with neural inflammation and one out of 88 kids now have that marker, which is 1.136%. Although a marker they were born with or they acquired, we don't know. Remember this is an inflammatory marker. It's a protein. So it's something that's being upregulated. This is why we need to understand the molecular mechanisms. It's not a genetic marker. It's a protein marker, which means it's coming out as the result of a set of biomolecular reactions. It's being upregulated. That mechanistic understanding we need to understand, which has not been. It's something I would want to look into.

But because of that, one out of 88 which now is 1.136%, so if you compare 1.136% versus 0.056%, that is nearly 200 times more brain inflammation among kids, or a thousand times more. But the cause is not established though. We're not saying the cause.

Exactly. I agree with you. It's the bridge example. One out of 100 bridges are falling down before. After hurricane we put in billions of dollars to rework them. We would as engineers would say hey man let's go look at this. We got to understand this. We would at least not have an arrogant attitude. We would say we need to understand this phenomena logically, mechanistically, what's going on. And I think this is the crux of the issue. The scientific method, engineering, basic analysis. Even what Trump pulled, when the three Boeings fell out, what did he do? He grounded them. Even if you have one failure in engineering you don't say oh that's a statistical risk. An engineering systems approach says when you have a problem or when you're selling a piece of software, even if one customer complains you go look at it because that bug can affect other people if they're using that particular feature.

So we don't fundamentally have an engineering approach in medicine. We have a Jonas Salk approach of public health telling medical doctors what's right and the medical doctors execute protocols. They're basically executing a recipe. Scott, in this case do this, this, this. It is not in some ways a humble approach to recognizing hey I'm seeing this difference. The reason I did measles was because it was 0.056% of brain inflammation. Now I'm seeing a higher incidence. Mothers are bringing this up. So do we just say they're crackpots or we say hey I'm going to listen to this, let me unravel this and understand the mechanistic underpinnings.

But isn't the problem that basically all the kids get the shots now? So if there were some other completely unrelated reason that this marker was being seen—let's say somebody suggested for example the fact that Microsoft exists and it attracts people to a place and those people get married. It's actually attracting people who might have a latent autism that isn't expressed really in any way but when two of them get married there's more odds. Isn't it possible there's more autism and everybody's getting the measles shot? So that's just a correlation. That's not really causation.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Correlation does not mean causation. But what you do in epidemiological work when you see a signal—it's called they do this in pharmacovigilance—when you see some signal you want to go investigate that with an understanding of causality. And I think this is the crux of it. So if you look at this there is some signal in the society. One out of 88 of these people have the same brain inflammation, the neuroinflammation, as similar to why we gave the measles vaccine. And mothers are bringing this up and there's a sense they're not being listened to.

So in that backdrop we do have the legitimate issue of the fact among those 30 vaccines only one was given a double-blind saline placebo controlled study. And on top of it science is moving to personalized precision medicine. We should be understanding mechanisms. We want to understand this. And the question is why isn't the vaccine research community embracing this because the drug development companies are.

There's a question being asked continuously in the comments here. If I could jump in, are you done with that point?

Yes.

They're asking to comment on aluminum. Apparently there are some alleged problems with aluminum as an ingredient in the shots. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah. So there's been a number of people. This has been a big debate. One of the things that we've been involved in is looking at Alzheimer's. Inside Cytosolve we've been modeling all the pathways and we work with some of the establishment scientists. Some among them when you bring up the aluminum issue they go oh that's nonsense. Aluminum does not cause any issues. Among another group of researchers there is data that aluminum crosses the blood-brain barrier and it has effects in affecting neurovascular diseases of all different kinds. And then there's a link between the aluminum and also the microbiome.

That's why the Gardasil study is a little bit murky because they hid it. And this is why people are rushing scientifically. I'm frankly a little bit miffed because you didn't do a pure vaccine versus placebo. You shoved in the aluminum. So if aluminum was in fact causing something it has noise. You've shoved in the noise to the control. So I have not looked at it but there is—you type in aluminum and stuff out there—there's this thesis that aluminum affects it. We just finished an NIH study which we're funded on looking at green tea's use in modulating the immune system. We're going to be adding aluminum to that and seeing how aluminum affects green tea because there's a theory that in China people have green tea with heavy metals in it. So I'm going to be exploring that in the next six months.

But I can tell you I don't want to make unscientific comments here because I don't want to get into this anti-vax slant. I can definitively say that we are not applying real risk management, safety, unbiased risk management standards, period. And this is the real issue.

So Dr. Shiva, if the law allowed you to do anything you wanted in this domain in terms of your own children and your small child is offered the shots just as they're given, or you could say for my own personal risk management, based on everything I know because I've really looked into this, I'm going to adjust what we're doing from the standard, how would you adjust it to feel comfortable with your own child, understanding that this is not advice for anybody else's child?

From my standpoint when you look at the body it's a very, very complex system. We don't understand this engineering system. And so it really comes down to my relationship with my physician, which is it's supposed to be an interaction between the physician and the parent in this case and the child. It should be this thing that emerges out of that discussion. Some children if they come from a history of immunocompromised families, a lot of autoimmune disorders, you would take a very different approach than if you came from a family which didn't have those issues. And you're saying you know what, I'm here, I came from India, I saw all sorts of disease and I don't want to see that. Two very different approaches.

In fact the Institute of Medicine—I have a lot of respect for them, this is the National Academy of Medicine—in 2011 they put out their report called the adverse effects of vaccines. This is like the most conservative group. In their report at the end of it they admitted there is now a causal relationship between the measles vaccine and anaphylaxis, MMR and joint pain. So they finally admitted across studies independently that there are correlations between MMR and those vaccines and other phenomenon.

However in their report—and some people on the anti-vaccine side are not going to like me for this—they said there is no correlation between MMR and autism, MMR and type 1 diabetes, or DTaP. But they end there. One of the important things in their concluding paragraphs in their final report, they said however there is much to learn about the human immune system, autoimmunity, and the effects of genetic variation, all of which may influence how people respond to vaccines. Precision medicine.

So what I'm saying is in the backdrop of where we do not really test these vaccines by any scientific gold standard, we have the movement towards precision medicine. In that given that background it really should go down to the parent and the doctor having a conversation. However what's happened in medicine is a doctor in many ways is made to think that they just have to prescribe and follow a process because there's so much licensure issues. If they don't do something they could be canned. And people who give exemptions, 95 doctors in California are now being questioned and they could have their licenses removed.

So then I guess what I'm trying to say, I want to have a relationship with my doctor. It's my child. You don't have the vaccine studies I should have. There should be a sense of respect, freedom, and choice to make this decision when you don't have data. In particular the vaccination thing is different than a lot of other topics because what you do will affect me and my children. So if you don't get vaccinated, and even there we don't know. For example the herd immunity question. We don't have any double-blind control studies of where you gave people vaccines and you didn't give them and then did it affect herd immunity? It could be that the vaccine itself, what they call shedding. There's a story with the mumps vaccine. They gave the soldiers—133 soldiers have been in quarantine, I don't know if they're still out of it—off the coast in the Middle East, American Navy soldiers were all given the mumps vaccine. They all got mumps. It's a massive outbreak.

So what I'm trying to say, we don't know the mechanism, Scott. Jonas Salk, polio, modern medicine, that is the big win. And it almost seems like there are kid gloves about questioning that. And we're moving into 21st century medicine demands that we start looking at safety issues, start applying engineering principles, and this is what we should be doing. The old model of Marcus Welby, the doctor comes in with his white shirt and there is some thing in the background noise that we're supposed to bow down to the doctor. I don't.

Let me make my best devil's advocate argument here based on what you're saying. It sounds to me that giving kids vaccinations might cause one or two percent of them to have a problem but the vast majority of them would avoid problems. Would I not still be on safer ground saying that we can tell—I saw, make a statement you can fact check—this I believe we can tell that on average the people who got the vaccinations had better outcomes but with the understanding that there might be individuals who are worse off because of it. Can I make that statement that more people are better off with vaccines on the whole than there are people being injured by it?

I think I don't know if you can say the first statement scientifically, Scott. What we can say is there are groups of people who may be injured. What we don't know is that risk number. We don't know the number, Scott. That's what I don't know. And in lieu of that it's hard to say what that number is. If we had double-blind control saline studies there would not be an issue.

Let me reword it as more of a business than a medical question. If I'm looking at a situation where I can't know the precise place I want to be, so let's say precision is not an option, so I could either go too far or I can go not far enough. Those are my only two options. So in the case of vaccinations too far—let's define that as where we are. Too far is taking some known substantial risk of not having double-blind placebo studies but still knowing a lot about what's going on. And the other is that you understood the mark. Do we know enough?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yes. And I'm saying we don't know because we don't have the risk assessment models for vaccine safety. So if you take the measles, which is the one that everyone brings out, did giving the measles vaccine—you know I got measles in India. I didn't get it. You got a rash and the thing and it went away. I got chickenpox. It went away. I think this is a fundamental question you're asking, Scott. Is after you got that vaccine, is the thesis that you saved that 0.056% of people from getting SSPE or are you saying you diminished that adverse effect, those number of people versus people who let's say vaccines never came? We don't know those numbers.

I accept your measles example is very strong because it's very—by the way each of these vaccines are different. Each of the vaccines behave in very different ways, the etiology of them, how the adaptive immune system responds. But one question is why are we giving hepatitis B vaccine to the instant a kid is born when that is for IV drug users and people with STDs? You see what I'm saying? Questions of the 30 vaccines and the 70 different doses that are given between zero to 18 months. I don't have an answer to that.

Let me ask this dumb guy statistical question which maybe will be helpful to the audience. If I were looking at the situation of let's say hypothetically I only had one choice to make, the measles vaccine or not, so it's just yes or no. And that one you've described a compelling argument that we have a pretty good idea that we don't know that the benefits are greater than the cost. But statistically speaking if I were to lump all of the vaccines together and all the people who take all the vaccines, could I say that that class, the whole class, take all the vaccines, has better outcomes than the entire class of people who took not?

I don't know we can say that, Scott. We don't have the data. And the other thing here, let me give you a very—it's not even analogy—the average 80-year-old today takes 12 different drugs. It's called drug-drug interaction. There is this whole field of saying what is going on, how many drugs are we giving and what effects do those combinations have? I mean zero to 18 we're hitting someone with 70 doses. We don't know what those combinations have. They've not been tested and nor are we using modern systems biology to model them, mechanistically understand them. And that is what I have a concern with. Even significant scientists that I respect, they're afraid to even broach this topic. And I think that it's a very important aspect of the scientific discourse as it doesn't take place around vaccines because it's sort of the foundational hallmark of modern Western medicine.

Well Dr. Shiva, this is amazing and helpful and very illuminating. I feel like for the first time, literally for the first time, I feel like I have some layman's understanding of the situation. I need to wrap up because I want to add a couple of things while I got my audience here. But thank you so much for coming on here and give us your Twitter handle for people.

My handle is @VA_Shiva. @VA as in victory underscore Shiva. I don't know, Scott, if you know I'll be also running again as a scientist for Senate in Massachusetts coming up in 2020. And we really want to have more discourse around a lot of these engineering and science issues. It's not going to be the fake Indian versus a real Indian. It's the MIT PhD versus the talent stack, which I think you nailed the first time. But I think vaccines offer great opportunity, Scott, for modern medicine, good our medicine discourse. It's a wonderful opportunity for discourse. And I really appreciate you having me on, Scott, giving me the opportunity. It's a really big public service. You, the very objective way that you look at issues. I thank you, doctor. I hope we helped today and I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

All right, that was terrific. He is so good at explaining stuff in a way that yeah, the way you can follow even if you don't know what's going on.

Let me talk about a few other things here while I got you. The New York Times issued let's say an update, not a retraction but an update. So there was this book saying that Brett Kavanaugh had done some naughty things in high school and then they quietly revised it to say that the person who is the alleged victim of this alleged act has no memory of it. So in other words the alleged victim doesn't think it happened as far as she knows. Think about that. That was like a major story in The New York Times and just totally made up as far as we can tell, or at least that important clarification was left out.

A bigoted deals at North Korea has invited President Trump to come over to Pyongyang. Am I pronouncing that right? Pyongyang. I don't think I've ever said Pyongyang in public before. It's the first time. And that looks like a good sign to me. So we'll see how that goes. I'm happy when Kim and Trump are talking and making plans because that feels like the safest situation we've ever been in. Would you not say that our current situation with North Korea is by far the safest it's ever been? Wouldn't you say? I mean it just doesn't look like he's heading in the wrong direction anymore. It looks like it's fixed. It will change forever but it looks like the dangerous part's over.

Let's talk about Saudi Arabia and the Aramco incident. The Houthis in Yemen took responsibility. They said it was them. But apparently our administration is saying well not so fast. It might have been Iran or the attack may have come from Iraq, which would still be Iran in terms of influence. And I'm just wondering, this was a tough one because everybody lies in these situations. I don't think you can necessarily believe what the United States is saying about this because they're going to say whatever gets the best effect, which you'd want them to. So I normally would be opposed to my government lying to me. The exception is national defense, national interests like this. So if my government is stretching a fact to put some pressure on Iran, well that's okay with me. As long as they know what they're doing, as long as there are enough people involved who are adults who know how this stuff works. I don't mind my government doing a little bit of stretching the truth if it's useful for persuasion.

So we don't know what's going on there. Who bombed who? But the interesting thing is that we can't tell how scary is it that some number of drones took out a major facility and we don't know where it came from and it came from a long ways away. So in other words it's not like there were airplanes above it. It may just have been some number of small flying things went a tremendous distance without detection. What's up with that? We're going to need to figure out how to detect those little guys.

My understanding is that there is a company now—and maybe I can have somebody else to talk about it—I believe there is a company now that detects drones so they can detect incoming drones and actually automatically initiate some kind of counter defense. So we'll talk about that. Sounds like that's something that everybody, every oil refinery, is going to need.

I guess Joe Biden's going to release his medical records. I would not expect to find anything interesting in there or else we wouldn't release them.

All right, I got to talk about the concert I went to last night. And this is going to sound like old man yelling at the sky. But I went to the Elton John concert last night because it was local and normally I would never go to a concert because I don't like the whole situation of the travel and the crowds and it takes too long and everything. So Elton John's doing his