(0:02 - 0:26) I'm Dr. Peter McCullough, and I'm here with my co-author, John Leake, a historian and a highly regarded author on so many aspects of human history and true crime. And we have a new book. And our show today is going to be dedicated to that new book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. (0:26 - 0:39) John, welcome to the program. Thanks, Doctor It was a great adventure writing this book with you. We've been working on researching the subject matter since about 2021. (0:40 - 1:21) And then we decided to go ahead and take a crack at writing a book on huge sprawling story about 300 years of intellectual and cultural history in the West. And we finally wrapped it up. I thought I would get you to tell our audience something that you told me when you said that you wanted to write this book, namely it was your experience when the first COVID-19 vaccine operation warp speed messaging started being broadcast and you began to perceive as a longstanding medical doctor and academic medical scientist. (1:22 - 1:38) What is going on here? The world seems to have taken a very strange lurch. How would you characterize those days? The world seemed to be off its axis. I think no doubt many would agree. (1:39 - 2:14) Now as a practicing internist and cardiologist, research epidemiologist, I had researched diagnostic tests, therapeutics, and then in distant past, I was an assistant on some development work on a vaccine many years ago, a failed vaccine actually for the staphylococcal organism. But I have to tell you in day by day practice, the word vaccine in internal medicine and cardiology didn't come up. It came up very rarely. (2:15 - 2:28) Vaccines weren't on my mind. I had actually never heard of ACIP or the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. I was generally aware of a schedule. (2:29 - 2:54) I had consulted the schedule a few times when I had traveled overseas. I questioned what vaccines my wife and I should take. Let me tell you, John, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, through 2020, did we not only have dramatic changes in our lives, but we started to hear a drumbeat. (2:55 - 3:36) And the drumbeat was in the medical literature, and there was a drumbeat in the media. We started to hear it all over, and it was the drumbeat of mass vaccination. Well, I mean, I remember in some of our early conversations, you just described it seems like every day in this mania, what seems to be a kind of a mania, a zealotry to mass vaccinate everybody, that standard medical practice that you had grown accustomed to over 30 years was just being thrown by the wayside. (3:36 - 4:13) As we described it in our chapter in the book, Reckless New World, there was a sort of an element of recklessness that seemed to have entered thinking and practice. I mean, I remember you told me, you know, the Pfizer messenger RNA vaccine was not tested on pregnant women. They weren't part of the trial, the testing, the phase three trials, but suddenly we're told that pregnant women should get it. (4:13 - 4:26) And I remember when you told me that thinking, it's true. It's remarkable. I mean, pregnant women for years won't even indulge in a solitary glass of wine, and suddenly they're lining up for this new procedure. (4:27 - 4:43) So talk a little bit about that. This perception that the world had sort of gone akimbo in a way. The pregnancy issue was, I think, one to hold out as such a glaring example. (4:43 - 5:28) In the first week of the COVID-19 vaccine campaign, as I recall, before there was any advice on either to refrain or actually to take a vaccine if one is pregnant, thousands of women came forward at vaccine centers that were set up, and they were administered for the first time in human history, synthetic messenger RNA by injection. The product was the Pfizer BNT-162 BioNTech vaccine. And no one in medicine could possibly know what would happen to the mother, the pregnancy, the baby. (5:29 - 5:50) There was no genotoxicity, no triatogenicity, no oncogenicity, preclinical studies. And in my clinical practice, this had never been done. In fact, drugs that we use in everyday adult internal medicine are considered off limits in pregnancy because we simply don't have any information to rely upon. (5:50 - 6:25) So as you're right, in the clinical trials, pregnant women, women at childbearing potential were strictly excluded from getting a COVID vaccine. Also those who had recovered from the infection in 2020 or had suspected recovery, some of the trials, it was those who even had antibodies as proof that they had had COVID-19. So this came into my view acutely as I was a professor of medicine at a major medical center and I was one of the few people in my academic department who had contracted COVID-19 in 2020. (6:26 - 6:39) In fact, it was just a few months before the vaccines had rolled out. So I was given a message that I should come get a COVID-19 vaccine. And if you recall at that time, vaccines were at a premium. (6:40 - 6:47) People were waiting in line for these. People couldn't wait to get their vaccine. And so I responded. (6:47 - 6:58) I said, thankfully, I've already had the infection. You know, the clinical trials, I would be disqualified from getting the vaccine. And then the response I got really stuck in my mind. (6:58 - 7:28) It said, you should get one anyway. And this was coming from, you know, one of the nurse coordinators who was at the vaccine desk that was literally just outside my office in the lobby. And I thought to myself, a nurse who's administering vaccines, and she has an administrative role in the hospital, it's in her mind that anybody should get this vaccine, whether they had the infection or not. (7:29 - 7:53) And this had never been undertaken before in medicine. If someone had already had measles, they weren't just given an extra measles shots or mumps and the list goes on and on. So, you know, as the pandemic unfolded and years into the pandemic, the word vaccine started to come up many times per day. (7:54 - 8:50) Vaccines came into view in congressional testimony, into mass public protests, into opinion editorials. Pejorative terms came out like anti-vaxxer. So, you know, I think together in our minds, we asked the question, is there any historical basis for this? Is there any help we can get from events in the history of vaccines that could help us understand how did the world fall into what appeared to be a mass trance or some type of mass zealotry over vaccination? The other thing that we talked about on this particular subject, you had already experienced COVID-19 illness. (8:51 - 9:30) It was PCR confirmed. And the directive was, well, doctor, you need to get the new vaccine anyway. And that was one of the first things that really jumped out at me was there seemed to be this idea in the minds of people that this new generation of genetic transfer technology, it did not only induce immunity in the old concept of vaccines, you expose the patient to an attenuated or an inactivated form of the pathogen. (9:30 - 10:01) And then that introducing that to the body then induces the immune system to respond. With the case of COVID-19, even when people like you who'd already experienced the illness, there seemed to be this unexamined thought, it will improve natural immunity. It's better, vaccine induced immunity is better than natural immunity, which was a profoundly confusing proposition. (10:02 - 10:44) The other thing that you pointed out as a cardiologist was it became evident fairly quickly that COVID-19 illness did not present a significant threat to young people, provided they weren't suffering from congenital conditions or other illnesses that would make them vulnerable. A healthy child was not particularly vulnerable to severe COVID-19 illness. So at first glance, you would think, let's not view that cohort as a cohort that we need to rush into vaccinating. (10:45 - 11:47) And yet, after a signal emerged that this new vaccine presented an elevated risk of myocarditis, particularly in young males, there was nevertheless an insistence that all young people receive the shot. We go into this very strange cardiology chapter in the book where the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine in October of 2021, he acknowledges that COVID-19 illness does not present the same risk to young people that it does to older people. He also acknowledges the safety signal of myocarditis, but then he says something very strange in this meeting, this FDA meeting, the only way we're going to know how all of this affects the young is just by giving them all the injection and seeing what happens. (11:48 - 12:16) I remember we met for dinner, I think that evening when you first learned of this statement and you were still kind of stunned when you came to dinner. Can you characterize your perception of that moment in October of 2021? You know, we're not talking about any doctor, John, we're talking about Dr. Eric Rubin. He's the editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine. (12:16 - 12:42) He also sat on the Emergency Use Authorization FDA committees. He was a voting panel member for both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines. Now, this is a stunning statement to say we don't know if it's safe to use in children and the only way to find out is to just start using it on a mass scale. (12:42 - 13:09) So there's several parts to this. He must believe that it was essential for children to take these vaccines, whether they had COVID or not, whether they had any risk or not. And at the same time, he must have believed that the benefit to these children could far outweigh any type of unknown risk. (13:10 - 14:16) And what we sought to do as we, you know, investigated events in history is how did that get in the mind of such a well-respected doctor? You know, on the surface, many of you listening would say that's, you know, completely reckless for him to say that. But, you know, in the context of someone who has ascended in his academic career to be the editor-in-chief in New England Journal of Medicine, that's about as big a prize in academic medicine as one can have. We'd have to ask the question, why was that in his mind? And was that in his mindset when he voted for the approval of both Pfizer and Moderna? So, you know, we explore this because we, you know, are far beyond the meets and bounds of randomized trials, of regulatory law, of disclosure of risks and benefits. (14:16 - 14:36) We're actually exploring what is in the human mind, primarily of doctors who are very close to vaccines. Yeah, so this is what took me back as I got the ball rolling on actually telling the narrative of this. Like, let's go back to the beginning of this thing. (14:36 - 15:13) You know, you read the book of Genesis, you know, in the beginning. So how did this start? And, you know, what were the prevailing conditions of mankind in the West? And I'm speaking primarily of the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and the North American, British colonies, and then the United States of America. During this period, our book starts in the year 1721 in the colony of Massachusetts Bay. (15:13 - 15:45) Boston, in which there was this new inoculation procedure that had just taken hold in academic circles, particularly at the Royal Society in England. Turns out that some of the first documentations of smallpox inoculation were from the Ottoman court in Istanbul. And so we go into this. (15:45 - 16:01) A member of the Royal Society finds himself in Istanbul. He hears about this so-called inoculation procedure. He writes a letter to the Royal Society talking about this inoculation, meaning someone has smallpox. (16:02 - 16:22) We now know it's a viral illness, causes flu-like symptoms, and then an eruption of painful red blisters that may cover the entire body. From the literature in the 18th century, it had a very high mortality rate, up to 30%. And it was a real scourge. (16:22 - 16:49) So the thought is someone has smallpox. There's an eruption of blisters. You could take some of the material, the matter coming out of the pustule, then put that onto a needle or a scalpel, then go to your healthy patient, make a small incision in the arm, and rub the smallpox matter into it. (16:49 - 16:59) That was the idea of inoculation. It sounds like a promising idea. We don't know exactly what causes smallpox. (16:59 - 17:15) We don't know what the causative agent is in the modern 20th century sense of a causative agent. It just seems to be some kind of contagious disease. But we actually know very little about it. (17:15 - 17:55) But it would seem that if you transfer this matter from the sick to the healthy, it inoculates the healthy from getting severe smallpox. That was the idea, a rather charming idea. John, the genesis of that idea may have been the observation that if you have a bundle of children sleeping in the same bed and smallpox is sweeping through communities, that there were cases of mild smallpox, where the children didn't get terribly sick. (17:55 - 18:11) And then there were cases of severe smallpox. And there probably was the observation that if you had mild smallpox and you survived it, you didn't get it again. It didn't occur over and over again. (18:11 - 18:40) So it may have come into someone's mind that a minor case of smallpox is a good thing, that you could, in a sense, be protected. I have a feeling, because they didn't know the causative organism, it didn't know the way it's spread, and there was no knowledge of the human immune system, but it must have been that type of bedrock common sense that got this kicked off. Absolutely. (18:41 - 19:23) And so what we then see is the idea, the concept seems to have some corresponding reality to what we're sort of observing in a common sense way. If we can take just a small amount of the disease-causing matter, what's apparently the disease-causing matter, create a mild localized outbreak or case of smallpox, then that will then confer protection to this inoculated person going forward for the rest of their lives. So that's the idea. (19:23 - 19:32) And it's a charming idea. It's one of these little insights that humans have from observation. Get just a little bit of the poison. (19:32 - 20:06) And it's important here to understand this. Already in the 18th century, they were using the word virus, but they were using the word virus not as a sub-microscopic organism, but as in the old Latin sense of the word, which literally means poison. So if you get a little bit of the disease-causing poison, you'll get a mild version of the disease, and then that will protect you from more severe disease. (20:07 - 21:14) Yeah. So, John, isn't this, just by the way we're unfolding it, isn't it suspect to a natural human tendency towards, and explain to our audience, what is a talisman? What is that? And why taking an inoculation, in this case, for smallpox, why could that quickly be thought of in the human mind like a talisman? A talisman or an iteration of a weapon, something, a talisman, a religious symbol, perhaps something from the natural world, which humans think invests or confers some kind of protection on the wearer. I mean, within the Christian context, I remember my mother saying that when her father served in the Second World War in the Italian campaign, he wore a Saint Christopher medal. (21:16 - 21:34) And I mean, he was wounded several times, but never mortally. And for the rest of his days, he thought, well, I mean, maybe my Saint Christopher, maybe, maybe it protected me in some way. Anyway, he then gave that Saint Christopher medal to my mother. (21:35 - 22:30) And so this is the idea of a talisman. And straight away we get into, I'm glad that you raised this, this idea of an inoculation seems to very early in human psychology sort of intersect with these broader, more metaphysical or religious ideas of protection. And it's interesting that the great advocate of smallpox inoculation in Boston was Cotton Mather, who was first and foremost a Puritan minister, who had been a consulting judge or excuse me, a consulting scholar at the Salem Witch Trials and was first and foremost interested in theology, but also empirical science. (22:31 - 22:49) And he himself became a member of the Royal Society. But Mather thought that there's empirical grounds for believing in the efficacy of smallpox inoculation. But he also, in his writings said, it's a providence from God as well. (22:49 - 23:05) God has given man this ingenuity, this insight. So God is, he's conferring his divine wisdom to the minds of men. And I think it sets the tone for the whole story. (23:06 - 23:36) Yeah. Well, John, Cotton Mather appears in chapter two of our book and you point out something else very interesting in the biography of Cotton Mather. Well, I thought it was interesting that he was a consulting scholar for the Salem Witch Trials and specifically he was consulted on the question of the admissibility of spectral evidence. (23:36 - 23:58) In other words, someone who has made the accusation that she has been tormented by another person practicing witchcraft. During the trial, it was mostly young girls, adolescent girls. And in retrospect, one wonders if these girls were just having a good time at the expense of all of the elders. (23:59 - 24:45) But when the accused was being examined, the girls would express terror and suddenly contort in pain as though the accused were tormenting them. And so the idea is only the accuser has access to this data. And then we're then placed in the position as the judges on the trial, is this what appears to be spectral evidence? Is it real? How do we evaluate it? Do we attach significance to it? So Mather is asked, okay, it's an invisible phenomenon. (24:45 - 25:31) How do we know if it's real? How do we know if it's a fabrication? And so I thought that was interesting because you understand very early in your own analysis of the origins of infectious disease research, humans are dealing with something that's invisible to the naked eye. I mean, as microscopes become more and more powerful in the late 18th and then in the 19th and 20th century, we start to actually see bacterium. But for centuries, humans had this experience that something that afflicts us with great suffering and illness and death, we can't see it. (25:32 - 26:54) So again, you're always kind of straddling this realm between the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible. Yeah. I do find it very interesting. I think our readers will find it as well, that someone who essentially accepted the evidentiary methods by which one could ascertain a witch was one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of vaccination. And so our book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, we're trying to tell the story of how this happened. And I think one of the inherent challenges from the very first vaccine to vaccines given today is that one never knows if they're really challenged with the infectious agent that the vaccine is purported to protect us from. It's like the talisman. I wasn't shot in World War II, maybe this cross worked. I never got smallpox, maybe my inoculation worked. (26:54 - 27:48) Why wouldn't the human mind think that if it's presented in a very bold, confident, and authoritative manner, why wouldn't the common man accept that? I think that's a very significant part of the psychology. The other psychology that we see time and again is it seems like a great idea. And we've all had these moments, you might call it optimism bias. It's like, oh yes, yes, this is the solution. We've got it, we've got it. And then when you embark on the process of evaluating whether it actually works, you've already been to some degree heavily biased and conditioned by wishful thinking. (27:48 - 31:07) I mean, you wanted to work and why wouldn't you want it to work? It could be a great thing for everybody. It could protect you, it could protect your children. And then of course, the other thing that we see very quickly is if it works, if you're a licensed physician who can perform the smallpox inoculation procedure, which was called variolation after the Latin word for smallpox, variola. If you could become a licensed purveyor of variolation, you could also make a great deal of money providing your patients with this service. And this happens almost immediately. I mean, Mather and his medical colleague, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, they publish about this in the Royal Society. Boylston quickly establishes a practice doing variolation. And then all over the English colonies and in the United Kingdom, doctors all over these realms develop very lucrative practices providing this inoculation procedure. But what we see happening as the 18th century progresses is the failures of this become so conspicuous that they can't be ignored. And we go into the very historically significant cases of King George III. He had a whole mess of children with the queen, but the two last children that they had, both of them received this smallpox inoculation procedure. There are portraits of these little children. They're very, very pretty. Both of them died shortly after they were inoculated. And so for the king and queen of England, the question is, maybe we shouldn't have inoculated the little princes. Contrast that with Benjamin Franklin in the colonies. He chose not to inoculate his child, Frankie, as he was called. Frankie apparently did contract smallpox and died. So then Benjamin Franklin has to lie awake at night wondering, well, maybe we should have inoculated him. But what we show in the book is that we have real no scientific means of knowing. Would the little princes have survived had they not gotten inoculated? Would they have been somehow spared of smallpox? We just don't know. There's just not sufficient data in the 18th century to draw any conclusions about whether this worked or not. What was the risk benefit? We don't know. It's just all a matter of observation. (31:08 - 36:48) Sometimes it seems to work. Sometimes it's a catastrophic failure, as it was with these two princes of England. So by the time you get to the end of the 18th century, there's the thought, it's a charming idea, but surely there's something better than this. Let's see if there's some better inoculation procedure. That takes us into the famous chapter of the first vaccine. Well, we're going to take a pause right here and we're going to pick up on this. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough with historian and author, John Leake. We've been discussing our new book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. We'll be back in just a minute. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough, internist and cardiologist and author and a proud co-author with historian and author, John Leake, our new book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. John has been telling us about the early experience with smallpox vaccination. Already, John, it's a story of, in a sense, blind faith. It's also a tale of power and money. Unlike other aspects of medicine, how close vaccination was in the minds and the stories and the events of royalty and of prominent public figures. Continue on. Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, these names are names that people recognize. Nobel prizes were awarded. What was it about vaccines? Out of all the aspects of medicine, what made it such a captivating topic or aspect of the lives of our most notable public figures? If you go back to the 18th century, what you see is there was a profound, terrifying perception that when one of these contagions comes to town, we're helpless. We don't understand it. We don't know why these things are suddenly upon the people, why suddenly people are getting sick. We don't understand the causative agent. These are invisible things, apparently. It's just we're suddenly afflicted with it. You take something like measles in the 18th century, and this goes back to, for example, Cotton Mather. A few years before this first smallpox inoculation campaign in Boston in 1721, go back to the year 1713, measles came to Boston and it killed half of Cotton Mather's children, and his wife, and his maid servant. So the virulence of measles as it struck early 18th century Boston, when we talk about this as we go into the 20th century, it was a profoundly, extremely virulent illness back then. And so this thought that maybe there's something, some kind of a procedure we could do that could confer protection, that could protect us from it. You see the immense charm of this idea. But where I was before the break was we start with the inoculation procedure of taking a little bit of smallpox matter from a sick person, transferring it to the arm of a healthy person to protect them with this inoculum from severe smallpox. When we get to Edward Jenner at the end of the 18th century, he's a country doctor in Gloucestershire, England. He starts hearing these stories that Gloucestershire is a place of the dairy industry. There's a great dairy industry that's long been there. A lot of people know the cheese, Gloucester cheese. He hears these stories that are frequently talked about amongst country doctors of milk maids, dairy maids who get these little blisters on their hands that they seem to get from milking cows that have similar blisters on their udders, on their teats. And the observation is these dairy maids, when smallpox comes to town, if there's an outbreak, the dairy maids who have had what they called cowpox don't seem to get smallpox. And even at the time amongst these rural physicians, there was the thought, this kind of has all of the hallmarks of a wife's tale. (36:48 - 40:28) It's almost like gossip. Who knows if it's true? Who knows if it's not? Jenner had recently become a member of the Royal Society for a paper he had written about the cuckoo, the bird. He had this observation. It was a question that had long plagued ornithologists. How does the cuckoo hatchling, how does he succeed in becoming the sole beneficiary of the mother of whatever the bird is? He's an imposter. To relate to those who don't know the life cycle of a cuckoo, the cuckoo mother hen lays her egg in the nest of the hen of another bird species. The cuckoo, and nobody understood how, how does the cuckoo fledgling get all of the other chicks in this nest out of the nest so that he is the sole beneficiary of the mother's ministrations? No one knew this for hundreds of years. Jenner submitted a paper to the Royal Society saying, I figured it out. I've made the observation. I'll let the reader read the book because it's a very funny moment in this story. He kind of took the Royal Society by storm with his paper about the cuckoo. So now he's a fellow of the Royal Society. Now he's in a position of academic authority. So he then sets out and he says, you know something, we've heard these stories of dairy maids who've contracted cowpox. They apparently did not subsequently get smallpox when it came through town. Let's see if we can scientifically establish the protective power of cowpox. So the word vaccine comes from the Latin word vacca for cow. So the first so-called vaccine comes from Edward Jenner's cowpox experiments in which he then proclaimed victory. Yes, I've done these experiments. I have inoculated subjects with cowpox material taken from cow's udders. And then I challenged them with material taken from someone who's actually suffering from smallpox. And from those challenge studies, he declared cowpox, the vaccine eye as he called it, confers protection against smallpox. Interestingly enough, the reviewers at the Royal Society were not convinced. His paper that he submitted as a fellow was not published. So he published it himself as a pamphlet. This is a long, very fascinating, in some respects, very comical story. But by the time you get to Jenner's fourth revision of this paper about his variola vaccinae, smallpox of the cow, it starts to catch on. (40:29 - 40:55) And people first in England, then in the United States, then on the continent of Europe, begin to think maybe Jenner is onto something. And pretty quickly, I would describe it as a widespread enthusiasm for the first vaccine really takes hold. Thomas Jefferson becomes a believer. (40:55 - 46:10) Napoleon becomes a believer. George IV of England becomes a believer. And off we are to the races with the first vaccine. Now, John, we spent a lot of time on smallpox, but I have to ask you, from Cotton Mather to Edward Jenner to the kings of England, presidents and dignitaries of the United States, in your research, did anyone express a concern over safety? Was anybody concerned that someone could actually get fatal smallpox from the procedure or have another complication? Yes. From the very beginning, there were skeptics. And so if you look at the early 19th century, you already have something that's eerily akin or resembles what was going on in 2020, 2021 in the United States, where there's a kind of a mass enthusiasm for this new vaccine, for this new product or procedure. But very quickly, you have, I would describe them as skeptical observers. And when I say skeptical, I mean that in a good way, in a good scientific way of the perception is, okay, I understand your enthusiasm, but does this actually work, A, and is it safe? And so when you look at the celebratory, the laudatory literature about Edward Jenner and the first smallpox vaccine, today, what's published, particularly what medical students today will read, what's published online, it completely obscures the fact that in the 19th century, there were skeptics and they weren't just being contrarians. These were doctors who were observing, okay, I have patients who receive this newfangled vaccine, but they nevertheless got smallpox. The other observation, and this is from the beginning, the other observation is not only did some of my patients subsequently get smallpox, even though they were vaccinated, the methods of inoculation, there were multiple methods. Some of them involved simply taking infectious matter from the teats of sick cattle. The other one was the arm-to-arm method, where one person would receive a smallpox vaccine, develop the pustules, and then that patient would then rub his arm, arm-to-arm with another patient who had little incisions made. So the arm-to-arm method, the observation then was it seems that in the arm-to-arm method, people are not only getting sick with smallpox, but they're getting sick with things like tuberculosis, puerperal fever, syphilis. So there were astute observers at the time in the 19th century in Jenner's day who were skeptical. But what you see over time is that the true believers ultimately got the upper hand. But John, let me ask you, why centuries ago, why was skepticism, which is the bedrock of science, right? Science is always hypothesis testing, skepticism is invited. Why on vaccines, from the very beginning, why does it appear to be censorship of skepticism? In fact, erasing skepticism from historical writings and manuscripts, why did that happen? Well, there you would have to examine the psychology of enthusiasm. I mean, it's a kind of hallelujah moment. At last, we've figured out some means of fighting back against this dreadful disease. And then you, Dr. Johnson in London, you're kind of spoiling the party. I mean, I think reigning on the parade, your skepticism is, you're being curmudgeonly, you're not accepting it because it's new. So enthusiasm. And of course- But it doesn't go a little farther than that. It's not just enthusiasm for an invention or an enthusiasm for a new business venture. (46:11 - 48:37) Doesn't it have to do something about the public good, the good for humanity, that if something is so good for everyone, then skepticism must be a bad thing. In today's world, we use the word vaccine hesitancy, that that's a bad thing because there must be a psychology that has developed that vaccines are good and that vaccine acceptance is good and that vaccine skepticism and resistance is bad. Well, your observation and your question is spot on, but it wasn't that it developed. It was straight out of the gate. I mean, Cotton Mather and his father, Increase Mather, they published about the new inoculation procedure, describing it as a gift from God. We're saved. This procedure is the salvation of humanity. And I mean, I really, as a historian, I always try and put myself in the shoes of people at the time. I mean, you read Cotton Mather's diary and we reproduce it in our book of just one by one, his little children are picked off by measles. I mean, it'll bring tears to your eyes when you read his diary. So it's the suffering of Job. Is there any way, is there any remedy? Is there anything that could protect us? So then someone has this observation of what is apparently salvation. So who are these skeptics to deprive us of salvation? And we see throughout the whole story in 2022, the Vatican issued a 20 euro silver coin celebrating, commemorating the salvation of the new COVID-19 vaccines. And, you know, it's a trinity. The iconography is a trinity. (48:37 - 49:03) A boy is preparing to receive the vaccine. The numismatic catalog from the Vatican uses the same phraseology as like a communicant prepares to receive the Eucharist. It is as though this new vaccine offers mankind the same salvation and hope as the God of the Christian revelation. (49:04 - 50:48) Would you go so far as saying that the converse, that the skepticism of a vaccine, or even the rejection of a vaccine could be equated to the rejection of God? Absolutely. I think the psychology, I think the psychology is the same. So look at the way these two brilliant champion athletes, we talk about this, it's a very, very dark chapter. In 2021, and then in early 2022, you have the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Mr., is it Rogers? Why am I forgetting his first name? Aaron Rodgers. Aaron Rodgers. You have Aaron Rodgers, and then you have the great champion tennis player, Djokovic, they're absolutely number one in their respective sports. I think Rogers was like the most valuable player of that year, and Djokovic was the great champion. Both of those guys expressed skepticism that they themselves, they didn't say, we don't think other people should get it. They just said, both of those champion athletes said, we take care of ourselves, we've reviewed the whole picture, and then all things considered, we are electing not to receive the vaccine ourselves. (50:49 - 55:33) Both of these champion athletes were relentlessly punished. Aaron Rodgers gave an interview with Rogan, in which, I remember listening to it and thinking, surely this isn't true. A complete ostracism. He wasn't allowed to be in the locker room with his teammates. It was like Aaron Rodgers was put in a ghetto. John, in this book, what we've concluded is that what happened to Aaron Rodgers and Novak Djokovic, and all of those who express skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines, that the roots of that human behavior go back centuries. They go back to the very beginning. We've spent this interview largely on the beginning, smallpox, but in our book, and pick up our book and go through the chapters, John Leake, a master author, really makes these characters go alive. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of characters as we move from smallpox, from diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, and we take it on through the modern day. There's nothing like vaccines in human medicine, what I've come to learn. The interface with royalty and legislatures and with the law, regulatory law, and John, I think in the last few minutes, one of the darkest developments in the history of vaccinology, and you bring it out, and it's a bad word, but the word is bioterrorism. Yes. We get to the early 21st century, and you see that these agencies of the United States federal government following the September the 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, we suddenly start hearing more and more about, well, the next attack is going to be a biological agent. It's not going to be a man flying an aircraft into a skyscraper. It's going to be a biological agent, for example, anthrax. And this is one of those twists and turns in the story that's just absolutely extraordinary because it's just a couple of weeks after the September the 11th attack that these letters arrive at the offices of congressmen and journalists and media studios that are contaminated with anthrax spores. The multiple people become ill, a few people die, and this was presented to the American people as, see, it's not only aircraft flying into skyscrapers, it's biological agents. And I think that a lot of the American public was so taken up by September the 11th and then the preparations for the Iraq war that it was a little bit overlooked who actually mailed the letters contaminated with anthrax spores. Turns out it wasn't Iraqi agents, it wasn't Islamic terrorists. It was a researcher who worked for the United States Department of Defense, a biodefense research lab in Fort Detrick. So we then pose the question in our book, what actually poses a greater emerging biological disease, infectious disease threat to the American people? Is it something truly and naturally emerging from nature or could it be that it's our own biodefense research complex tinkering around with these infectious disease agents and laboratories? Could that biodefense complex pose the greater threat to the health of our people? And I think that the answer is yes. (55:34 - 57:56) But John, we're going to have to bring this to a close with that irony. I think our listeners can only come to that conclusion, that the irony of such a laudable human endeavor, that is to protect ourselves and others, to save populations from an existential threat, such a laudable human exercise, that the irony of it is that the development of these vaccines and the researches on these vaccines have in fact, in these examples, actually brought disease to populations, have actually made populations ill, and sadly vaccines, like all other medicines, have not been free of side effects or safety problems. So we want to thank you so much for listening to our presentation about our new book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. Go to your favorite bookseller. It's available on Amazon. It's receiving fantastic ratings. We want to give great thanks to our publishers. And John, why don't you tell us about our publishers and the other people behind the scenes? Well, Tony Lyons at Skyhorse, I had had multiple conversations with him over the last few years. And I mentioned that Dr. McCullough and I have gotten really fascinated in the whole subject matter. So it was actually Tony Lyons at Skyhorse who said, well, why don't you guys go ahead and write a book about it? So special thanks to Tony and the rest of the team at Skyhorse. And yes, please check out the book. It's available on Amazon. And we think that you'll find it quite a wild ride, not only getting into the technical aspects of medical evaluation of vaccines, but it's a long and fascinating religious, intellectual, and cultural history going back 300 years. Well, that's going to close for today. So check out our new book, Vaccines, Mythology, Ideology, and Reality. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough, author and historian, Dr. John Leake. Thank you so much for watching.