February 7, 2015
Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/truth-about-vaccinations/
[00:00] Introduction/Greenfield Fitness Systems
[02:02] Stephanie Seneff
[04:17] Stephanie's Qualifications and How She Got Into Vaccines
[07:18] Were People Actually Dying From Smallpox?
[09:33] Is History Lying About Vaccination?
[14:54] Vaccines and Autism
[18:51] Glyphosate and Autism
[25:51] Thimerosal and Mercury
[29:34] Hydrochloric Acid
[34:47] Formaldehyde in Vaccines
[38:33] Alternative Vaccination Schedules
[43:27] What She Would Do If She Had A Child Today
[49:45] End of Podcast
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Hey, folks. It's Ben Greenfield. And the topic of vaccinations is not only a controversial one, but it's also something that has come up on the podcast a few times. And I've been careful not to delve too deeply into the issue because I know that it's something that is controversial, and frankly one of the reasons I've avoided it is because it gets people riled up and it seems like whenever I mention vaccinations on the show, I get emails or comments on both sides of the equation. Well today, I decided to bring on someone who can speak in pretty good depth to the science behind vaccinations so that she can answer some of the questions that come up about vaccinations and dispel some of the myths that are out there.
My guest today is Stephanie Seneff. And Stephanie is actually a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She's published over 170 different referenced articles on the subjects of everything from biology and computation to gene predictions. She's got a huge background in science and a lot of her research interests are in biology, concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. So just in the past few years, she's written over a dozen papers in a bunch of different medical and health related journals on things like modern day diseases like Alzheimer's and autism, to drug side effects, to the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health. And she also has a little bit of a background in terms of researching some of the specific ingredients in vaccines and the concept of vaccinations in general. So we're going to be delving into that in today's call. So Stephanie, thanks for coming on.
Stephanie: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Ben: Now my question is how somebody who is a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came to be interested in something like vaccines. What exactly makes you qualified to talk about vaccines and how did you get interested in this in the first place?
Stephanie: I got interested in vaccines several decades ago actually when I was a young mother of a three year old and I had a friend who also had a small child and her child was vaccinated with the DTP vaccine. DTP at that time, DTP vaccine. EPT, DPT, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine. And he ran a high fever. A week later he had seizures. And then of course they assured her the vaccine had nothing to do with it, don't worry about it. And he developed a severe case of autism. So I was exposed to autism early on at a time when it was very rare. And so I was always kind of looking at autism, and I watch as the rates were going up, since 1975. CDC kept coming up with new numbers. If you put those numbers on a plot, from '75 to 2014, you'll easily see that it's exponential growth. I mean they keep on saying, “Oh, yeah. We're just diagnosing him,” or they don't want to worry about it, most of the spending is on genetics. They keep saying, “Oh, it's a genetic problem.” It's clearly an environmental problem.
And of course there's all these mothers who have autistic kids who are absolutely convinced that my child was fine. Multiple vaccines came in, and maybe the same kind of thing, ran a high fever, then their speech started degrading, and then they sort of reverted back into autism. If it's genetic, it doesn't work that way. It's clearly something fishy going on. Of course, vaccines have been have… the population has been misled into thinking that vaccines absolutely necessary and then without them, we would just all be dying of smallpox. I mean it's just not true. It's not a natural thing to be getting all of these shots in order to protect yourself from disease. That's not the way nature is supposed to make it happen. And you are paying a huge price for these vaccines because there's a lot of stuff in there that's going directly into the blood that's very toxic. And so it's very naive to say, “Oh, yeah. They're harmless. What could they do?” It's very clear that they do harm and I have looked extensively at the virus database. And as a computer scientist, I can analyze things in very interesting ways and I'm finding all kinds of amazing things out the VAERS database. That's the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System which is put out by the CDC. I mean I'm very thankful that the CDC offers these databases. And they're online and anybody can download them. So lots of people could be doing what I'm doing. There's a lot we've found in that database that has not yet been reported. [0:06:37] ______ to that.
Ben: My question for you is you mentioned a little bit ago that a lot of these things like measles, and mumps, and I know that whooping cough is another thing that has been vaccinated against, that a lot of these we're naturally supposed to be able to take care of. But isn't it a fact that diseases like polio, and measles, and mumps, and rubella have kind of been on their way out since vaccinations were introduced, back in, I don't know the exact date, the exact year the vaccinations were introduced. But up until that point, weren't hundreds of thousands of people dying from things like smallpox?
Stephanie: Absolutely not. It's all very complicated because a lot of it actually has to do with the toxic chemicals in the environment. Suzanne Humphreys, I mean if you don't know Suzanne Humphreys, you need to read her books. She's got videos online. She's awesome, she's an MD, and she basically quit her hospital, as far as I understand it from her video. She quit her job at the hospital because they refused to listen to her when she said, “We should not be giving these elderly people flu vaccines when they enter the hospital because it's killing them.” And she was seeing that. They come and get the flu vaccine and go downhill. I mean flu vaccine is one that is just ridiculous, in my opinion. And right now we have the flu epidemic. And no one says, “here we have been the last few years harassing people to get your flu shot.” I see it all the time. You go to the local drug store and there it is, get your… sometimes free, flu shots offer. They’re determined to make sure the entire population gets a flu shot every year.
The flu vaccine can contains glutamate and it also often contains mercury, and these are both very toxic especially when they're working synergistically with other toxic chemicals in the environment. It's very unsafe to get a flu vaccine. And the thing is it's not even protecting you from the flu because it only protects a subset of the different strain, first of all. So this means that will be opportunistic for other viruses to grow. So all you're doing is just pushing it around. So instead of this virus, you get this other virus. There's these syncytial viruses that give you something that looks just like the flu. You're not going to be protected from them at all by the flu vaccine. So all that's going to happen is you'll just get something else. If you are sick and if your immune system is weak, you're going to get the flu. And that's what we're seeing. We're weakening the immune systems of the entire population in part by giving them flu vaccines. I mean I have never had a flu vaccine and I can't remember the last time I had the flu.
Ben: I want to ask you, I want to get into some of those ingredients that you mentioned that were in the flu vaccine that I know are in some other vaccinations. But back to this whole idea of smallpox eradication, measles, mumps going down in the advent of vaccination, et cetera, are you implying that history is not exactly true? That it's a different story?
Stephanie: I am. I definitely.
Ben: Can you explain?
Stephanie: And this why you need to read Suzanne Humphrey's book. And it's available online. You can look at the plot. Very, very interesting because…
Ben: I'll certainly link to that book in the show notes for people who are listening in. And by the way, if you are listening in just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/vaccines, that's bengreenfieldfitnesscom/vaccines if you want to see the show notes. But give us the overview. Why is history different?
Stephanie: For example, polio is very interesting. Because when you look at the polio epidemic with all the people, you're going to have all the pictures of the kids with the braces, they're here crippled and all this and you think, “Oh my god, it's such a horrible virus.” Her opinion, and it's my opinion as well, is that the crippling aspect of polio was not actually caused by the virus. It was caused by the chemical that they were exposed to, which was DDT. And actually when you look at the use of DDT and time trends of that usage and you plot that against the polio epidemic today, they line up. They line up very…
Ben: You mean the use of DDT, like as a mosquito repellent?
Stephanie: Absolutely. And DDT got banned about the same time as polio suddenly was no longer a problem. And of course also at the same time, the polio vaccine was introduced. The vaccines are getting a windfall. It's like, “Oh, the vaccine solved the problem.” But it isn't true and they actually saw two problems with one fell swoop. They convince everybody that the polio vaccine is awesome and they didn't get people distracted to looking at the problems with DDT. So they saw for the chemical industries, it's a wonderful boon. People are now convinced vaccines walk on water and they're not realizing that DDT is causing things like paralysis.
Ben: So what you're saying is that when we're looking at a lot of these issues like small pox, measles, mumps, rubella, even though they are down after the advent of vaccinations, are you saying that the reason that they were there in the first place was not necessarily due to human being's inherent propensity to get those diseases, but due to environment toxins?
Stephanie: I'm not, actually. I'm not. Actually, I have a very different take. I actually believe that measles, mumps, and rubella are childhood diseases, a rite of passage that we should allow our children to get these diseases. And in fact, getting these diseases will make their immune system strong. You're exposed to these things.
Ben: I mean a lot of people would be shocked to hear that a kid is supposed to get MMR. I mean do kids not die if they get MMR? Or have pretty serious side effects?
Stephanie: I'm learning some very interesting things about viruses, and I can specifically talk about flu. But more generally, the flu virus is extremely interesting, and I've studied it and what it does. And actually it goes into muscle cells, I mean you get muscle aches and pains 'cause you're infected, it extracts sulfate from the muscle cells and delivers it to the immune system. So the immune cells eat the flu virus and gather the sulfates that's being delivered to them by the virus. It's actually a sulfate transport system. And when you have a severe sulfate deficiency, you're going to be vulnerable to flu. And the reason is because your blood desperately needs sulfate and the flu virus can solve the problem. So if you keep getting flu vaccines, you don't get the flu, your problem gets worse and worse, and eventually you get such a terrible flu that it kills you because you can't handle the load of the disruption of your biology during the process of this sulfate delivery mechanism. So basically I believe that infections by viruses are a mechanism to transport important nutrients that are otherwise difficult transport. And in many cases they're difficult because of toxic chemicals in the environment that are disrupting your own natural system of transport. And that is certainly true for sulfate.
Ben: Let's say a child gets measles, mumps, and rubella, are you saying a day would be less susceptible later on in life to come down something like the flu?
Stephanie: I am exactly saying that. I am exactly saying that.
Ben: So it's almost like a protective mechanism.
Stephanie: Children get these diseases as a way to improve their biology, make them stronger, make their immune system stronger because it's delivering sulfate to the immune cells. The immune cells need sulfate in order to be able to metabolize the viruses and the bacteria. So when the immune cells don't have enough sulfate, they can't digest bugs, they can't digest bacteria. And so they have to just let the bacteria grow and you get something like sepsis. You get sepsis because your immune system doesn't have enough sulfate.
Ben: Okay. So how about this whole thing? And I know you mentioned some ingredients a little while back as far as the flu and stuff, and I do want to delve into those ingredients. But before we do, I want to talk about this whole autism thing. Because there was this idea going around for a while, still is, that vaccines cause autism. And what I've read is that it was originated by this guy named Andrew Wakefield who published some paper in the English medical journal The Lancet that claimed this link between autism and MMR, measles, mumps, and rubella. And then it turned, this is what was reported that, he fudged the data and that he did a bunch of other shady stuff, like paid kids for blood samples at his son's birthday party, and had a bunch of conflicts of interests, and basically the whole thing sounds like it was kind of a scam. What's your take on this and the link between vaccines and autism?
Stephaine: First of all, I think it was necessary for the industry to tear him to shreds in order to rescues the vaccine. And they understood that his paper was a threat. I'll tell you he wrote a later paper which of course was published in that obscure journal back in 2003 I think, or 2004, and I was researching the VAERS database, and I wrote a paper, and I was figuring out all this stuff about the gut dysbiosis, and the gut-brain axis, and the encephalopathy, and I was figuring all that out from the VAERS database and the stuff I was seeing. I had my paper almost finished, and then I came across his paper and I was blown away because he was saying exactly the same thing in 2004 that I was saying in 2012 and I felt really frustrated that I had to rediscover it because I didn't find his paper because it was so obscure. He's been practically banished from the literature. He's a genius and he understood what was going on with autism before anybody else did and this whole notion of the gut-brain connection. Because he's right on about the gut, he talks about the dysbiosis of the gut, and the leaky gut, and then the toxins getting into the brain. That is exactly what's going on today, and the vaccines are enabling that to be much worse than it would otherwise be. And in particular MMR.
MMR is very interesting. So I looked at VAERS and I saw his, I knew about his Lancet paper, and I was puzzled by it because MMR does not contain aluminum, does not contain mercury. And everyone's saying, and I know lots people are saying mercury, and mercury is very toxic. And they're absolutely right, mercury is a problem in the vaccines. But since MMR doesn't contain it, you think, “Well how can it be and the other thing is aluminum, and MMR doesn't contain that either, so I was really puzzled. I looked at VAERS and I indeed saw that autism is linked to MMR in the VAERS database. And interestingly, if you look at the MMR data in VAERS before 2002 and you look at the data after 2002, it has two different data sets and you can prepare an age-match distribution from both sets. So you've got all these kids getting MMR over the same count at each age before and after 2002 and you look at the side effects, at that the reactions that are showing up.
The VAERS database lists all the different things that they're experiencing and you find something really, really interesting, which is that the one symptom that shows up more often before 2002 is joint pain. Joint pain. And then there's a whole bunch of symptoms that show up more often after 2002, and a lot of them related to the brain. Things like comas, seizures, death. I mean all kinds of, and autism! Austism is showing up more often after 2002 than before. Statistically significantly more often. So you say, “Well, what's going on? It's the same vaccine, it's the same age distribution. Why is it suddenly more toxic to the brain after 2002?” I mean I was really puzzled. And I think I figured it out, and I think the answer is glutamate. And glutamate is in fact…
Ben: Glutamate?
Stephanie: Yeah, glutamate. Glutamate is in the MMR vaccine because it's a live virus that's grown on gelatin, and gelatin, 10% of gelatin is glutamate. I mean, a lot of glutamate in the gelatin that's in the vaccine.
Ben: Whoa, wait. Just a second. Just to clarify here. Gelatin is something a lot of people take for health. I make broth and that's gelatin that's in the bone broth. And you can get it in supplements. But does that have glyphosate in it too?
Stephanie: It has glutamate, yeah. But the thing is it goes to the gut and the gut bacteria converts it to glutamine, which is non-toxic. Glutamate is a neurotoxin. And ordinarily your gut microbes will make sure, they're there doing all kinds of things for you. I mean things that go through the gut, the gut microbes are rescuing you from all the dangers of all the stuff you're eating a lot. If they're working properly, of course they're not working properly, that's because of the glyphosate. Gylphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, which is a pervasive herbicide that's all over the planet and it is a major contributor to the vaccine problem today. It's the reason why all these things are more toxic today than they used to be in the vaccines, because of the glyphosate.
Ben: So this glyphosate, what exactly does it do that would potentially cause it to cause something like autism?
Stephanie: Well it does a lot of things that cause autism, and I've written extensively about them. And it does these things in concert with the vaccines. It works synergistically with aluminum and it works synergistically with glutamate to cause harm to the brain. And the glutamate story is very simple. And in fact, the glutamate that's in the gelatin that you're eating will become more toxic if you've got sufficient glyphosate in gut to disrupt the bacteria's ability to detoxify the glutamate.
Ben: If I'm not getting a vaccine, how else would I have glyphosate in my gut?
Stephanie: By eating food. All the food contains glyphosate. A lot of the food. I mean you'd have to eat strictly organic. And even organic food contains glyphosate. It's amazing. Because they can't use…
Ben: You mean the glyphosate that's just getting into our… from Roundup Ready?
Stephanie: Absolutely. We've got these Roundup Ready crops, the corn, the soy, the canola, the sugar beets, they're all Roundup Ready, which means that you spray Roundup on them and they don't die. They're the only plants that don't die when they're exposed to glyphosate because it's a universal killer of plants. And it also kills microbes.
Ben: Is there a list anywhere of foods that contain, like if somebody were listening in right now and they were like, “Holy cow. Well, maybe I won't get a flu vaccine because of the glyphosate in that.” But what if they just wanted to figure out what kind of foods they might have in the grocery store or in their pantry that might have glyphosate in them. Is there a list anywhere?
Stephanie: There is. And in fact, Anthony Samsel and I published a paper. We published multiple papers. We have two that we've published and we're publishing a third one which has just been accepted on glyphosate. And the first one includes a list which was taken out of, you can get it on the web, but it's hard to find, from the US government regulatory agency which lists the amount of glyphosate that's allowed in the various food crops in parts per million. So they have a list of… it's not supposed to be above that number. The way they get that number is by… and they do very little measuring, by the way, of glyphosate, which I find shocking because it's by far the most used herbicide on the planet. The belief is that it's non-toxic.
Monsanto has really promoted that concept that it's non-toxic to humans. It's a wonderful herbicide because it doesn't hurt us. And it is simply not true. I'm absolutely certain that it's not true, and there are many papers that show that it's not true. So we're naively using this. Of course we can go the hardware store and pick up some to kill our weeds in our yard too. And we'll probably use it carelessly 'cause we don't realize it's so toxic. That's going to cause trouble too. But the food, I mean it's all over the food. And certain foods are worse than others. I won't touch anything that isn't organic if it's corn, soy. I mean I eat all organic. But if I were being a little bit more sloppy about it, the first things I would get rid of are the corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, which are all Roundup Ready. Plus the wheat and sugar cane, which are sprayed with Roundup right before the harvest in order to kill the crop. They're bound to contain glyphosate as well. So you can see I'm…
Ben: Okay. So corn, soy, canola, and sugar. So even if somebody's eating gluten-free but they're going out and getting organic corn tortilla tacos or something like that, they could still have some, even if they're organic, that doesn't mean they're non-GMO?
Stephanie: Organic will not be Roundup Ready. Organic…
Ben: That's one thing I realized. We used to have taco Tuesdays at our house, and for a while we were patting ourselves on the back that we were doing organic corn. And then I started to look at the tortillas we were using and realized that just because they were these nice organic corn tortillas, that didn't mean they weren't genetically modified corn.
Stephanie: No, no. It does. It does mean that. It can only allow something like 5%. So there could be a little bit of GMO, but it's mostly not non-GMO and they can't use glyphosate.
Ben: So if it's certified organic corn, then you're okay?
Stephanie: You're much better. The thing is that organic even still has glyphosate in it, people have measured it, and it's not because they're putting Roundup on it, it's because there's glyphosate all over the place. It's in the water, it's in the soil. I mean they have to have their soil checked to make sure that it's healthy before they can even be certified as organic. But it's in the water, it's in the air. I mean you can't avoid it blowing in from a neighbor. I mean it's just really amazing, this stuff is everywhere. But you're going to get less, significantly less exposure by eating organic.
Ben: Mercury and aluminum then aren't really the problem when it comes to MMR vaccine. You're saying that glyphosate is the bigger issue?
Stephanie: Glutamate working synergistically with glyphosate, and this is because glyphosate chelates manganese, and manganese is essential to detoxify glutamate. Glutamate is converted to glutamine, as I said, by the gut microbes. That's how they actually fixate nitrogen. It's extremely important, this conversion of glutamate to glutamine, picks up a nitrogen atom. So you're kind of converting nitrates into proteins, which then becomes useful to the whole body. That process is just disrupted by glyphosate, and this has huge consequences. But one of the consequences is that glutamate becomes toxic to the brain. Glyphosate also causes a leaky brain. So you're allowing the aluminum to get into the brain, which is why it showing up as brain symptoms after 2002 compared to joint symptoms before 2002. These are all known symptoms of MSG intolerance.
So people who are intolerant to MSG get exactly the same symptoms as the symptoms that are showing up in contrast between the “before 2002”, “after 2002” VAERS database of MMR. So it's really a good story. I feel like I've really solved this mystery and that MMR is causative in autism because it allows glutamate to get into the brain and glutamate is a known neurotoxin. In the brain actually, glutamate is also converted to glutamine in order to detoxify it. Glutamate is a neuroexcitatory. It's actually a neurotransmitter. I mean it's a very important thing, but it…
Ben: That's why you get a fuzzy head when you walk out of Chinese restaurants, right?
Stephanie: Yeah. Right. The MSG. I mean that's the thing, MSG is free glutamate, and especially if you can't metabolize it to glutamine, you're going to be in trouble. I mean I know someone actually who came to visit us at MIT. We had a Chinese dinner and she had to be rushed off to the hospital because of her reaction to MSG.
Ben: Wow.
Stephanie: Some people are very sensitive, and those are the ones who are going to get clobbered by the MMR vaccine. And there's going to be more and more of them because of the presence of glyphosate everywhere in the food, the water, the air.
Ben: The people that are more sensitive to MSG, is it likely that they've also been exposed to more glyphosate than someone that is less sensitive?
Stephanie: I guess that. Of course, there's always a genetic component. But yes, I would suspect that that would be the case.
Ben: Interesting. Okay. So there's another ingredient that I've seen talked about quite a bit when it comes to vaccines, and that's thimerosal, one of the preservatives that's in vaccines. And I know that a lot of people say that that is not favorable because it has mercury in it. But I've seen a couple different thoughts out there on mercury and what I've read is that the mercury in thimerasol is a form of a mercury called ethyl mercury, and that gets flushed out of the body unlike methyl mercury, which would be the bad form of mercury. What's the deal with thimerosal? Is it something that we don't need to worry about because the form of mercury is not damaging?
Stephanie: That's not the case because when you are injecting it like that, you're getting all of it into the body, whereas ordinarily if you have a healthy gut, it doesn't get through. So because of the mode in which it's delivered…
Ben: So you're saying, well what about, can we use fish as an example? If I eat fish and it has mercury in it, it's going to be metabolized much differently by my body compared to injecting that mercury straight into the bloodstream. Is that what you're saying?
Stephanie: I am absolutely saying that. The same thing goes for aluminum. So the interesting thing about mercury, and I've read about all that, they had that whole flurry of activity around the year 2000, and I've looked again at VAERS, I looked very carefully at it and what's going on there. It's extremely interesting. They claimed that they reduced, they took the mercury out. They basically changed the formulation of the vaccine and that there was much less mercury after 2000. And then they said, “Oh, look. The autism rate is still going up despite this. So clearly it's not the mercury.” End of discussion. This was a story that was told, I don't know if you remember that, but that was around 2000. Sounds beautiful. Okay, fine. Don't worry about mercury anymore.
But the problem is it's not true because what they did, well first of all glyphosate was going up alarmingly at that time because they had introduced these GMO Roundup Ready crops and they were growing more and more of them every year right during that period. And glyphosate causes autism, so you're seeing that against, that's a backdrop against which you're removing this mercury. And then the other thing is they introduced more aluminum into the vaccines. They started introducing more vaccines that contained aluminum simultaneously with the withdrawal of the mercury. Now I don't know if they did this intentionally to stack the deck so you wouldn't see the mercury toxicity or whether it was just an accident and they didn't realize what they were doing, but it looks very suspicious to me that they could easily hide the toxicity of mercury through these tricks of introducing these other things that are going to make autism go up.
Ben: Interesting.
Stephanie: And in fact, when you look at VAERS, and I've looked at the autism, let me see if I can get this right, I'm trying to picture my graph. There's a sharp rise in the amount of aluminum in the VAERS. If you just accumulate the aluminum in the actual vaccines where the reactions are reported in the VAERS database, you just get the total aluminum burden.
Ben: Now what are you saying? The bars database?
Stephaine: V-A-E-R-S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, an awesome database that I have really gotten a lot of information out of it. There's issues with it, of course because mothers can issue reports. So it's not all from medical documents, and sometimes there are duplications. So there's issues and people often just say, “Well, you have to dismiss VAERS because of these issues.” But you can find all kinds of interesting things in there that make sense. There's noise because of all that, but it still doesn't deny that there's a signal and the signal is very strong about the increased toxicity of aluminum and glutamate containing vaccines after, in the later years compared to the early years. And the difference that there's much more glyphosate now than there was then. And the glyphosate is making the aluminum and the glutamate, and probably the mercury as well by the way, much more toxic than they would otherwise be. So synergistic toxicity between these elements in the vaccine and the glyphosate, which is all over the place, in the food, the water, the air.
Ben: Okay. Got it. Now I want to ask you about another ingredient and that is hydrochloric acid. And you see that hydrochloric acid gets called out a lot as a bad ingredient vaccines, but it seems that the body should be able to neutralize that pretty easily. I mean we've got hydrochloric acid in our guts for example. I know that the gut is different than the bloodstream, but is hydrochloric acid an issue? Because that's another one that I see kind of called out as a dangerous ingredient vaccines?
Stephanie: That's interesting because I have missed that one and I haven't studied it, but I can guess that it would be. And the reason is actually again because of the disruption. I mean glyhposate is a train wreck for the body and it's causing a lot of dysbiosis and hydrochloric acid can become hypochlorite. Hypochlorite is something that the immune system uses to kill bugs. It's basically Clorox. The body actually produces hypochlorite under an immune attack. So when your immune cells are busy fighting bugs, they're going to release hypochlorite. And so if there is hydrochloric acid being released by the vaccine, it could actually be as it could be a signal, a confusing signal to the body to make the body think that there's an immune reaction, that there's an attack by bugs. And maybe that's why it's there. Now I have, as I said, I'm going out on a limb here because I haven't studied it. I'll go back and study this as I get off the phone here.
But it might be that they've observed that if they put that in there they get a better response, and that would be because of a false signal. You're basically like to fool the body. That's what the vaccines are about. The aluminum also increases. The reason why they put aluminum in is because it increases the take, it increases the likelihood that you will actually develop these antibodies that you need to develop in order to gain the immunity that the vaccine is supposed to give you. So the other problem you can have is that you've got the vaccine, but it didn't actually prevent you from getting the disease. And we're seeing that now, we're seeing people getting measles and whatnot who have been fully vaccinated. This is a problem we're facing right now. And actually getting all these diseases when you're much older, measles for example turns into a really toxic disease if you get it when you're older. As a child it's much, much easier for you to cope with it. So we're sort of…
Ben: And this is a completely different approach too. Because the idea typically is that if enough people are vaccinated against the disease, then the disease has trouble spreading. It's like herd immunity. But what you're saying is that's a bad idea to not allow the disease to spread, because in doing so we are setting ourselves up for different diseases later on in life that are going to be more damaging to us than these other things like measles, mumps, and rubella would have been were young?
Stephanie: Yeah. I mean basically there's a lot of microbes out there, and new ones can always come in to replace the ones that are being immunized against. And chances are the new ones are going to be worse than the ones that you're not getting. So you've got the more popular ones that have been giving us diseases, that have been helping us to redistribute our sulfate, for example, and now we can't get those anymore so we start to get a huge problem with sulfate deficiency, and then we become very vulnerable to some other bug that's going to overgrow in our body and possibly be much more toxic than the one that we have protected ourselves against. And that's like this syncytial versus, the flu virus.
And of course this year, I mean I think it's ironic that we've been pushing this flu vaccine so hard for so many years, and here we are with an epidemic, you would think that by this point, with everybody getting a flu shot every year, that we would have been massively immunized against the flu. You would think it would have disappeared. It's clearly not happening. The vaccine is actually working against us and making the flu more vicious, we're getting more people in the hospital with the flu. I mean everything is working the wrong way and it's ironic to me, they keep on saying, “Get your flu vaccine, you idiot.” And I just find that very amusing. The way you avoid the flu is, I mean the way I've avoided it is by staying healthy. You eat organic foods, you get a lot of sunlight exposure to the skin to assure sufficient sulfate supply, you eat sulfur-containing foods, you won't get the flu. I'm not worried about the flu at all.
Ben: So you use a lot of sulfur containing foods. Do you use sulfur-type of supplements as well? I mean there are things like glutathione, for example.
Stephaine: Glutatione, glucosamine sulfate, chondroitin sulfate, methylsufonylmethane, alpha-lipoic acid, there's a bunch of things that contain sulfur. I don't take any of them because I don't take supplements, but I would if I were sick. If I were diagnosed with cancer, the first thing I would do is start gulping these things. Because I believe that sulfur deficiency, and a particular sulfate deficiency, sulfate is sulfur plus four oxygens, plus -2 charge, SO4^-2, an extremely important molecule in the body. Very, very difficult to transport and very, very essential to the health of the blood. This is the key thing I've identified as a dysfunction in modern society behind many of the modern diseases.
Ben: Before asking you about some of the potential alternatives to vaccines and some of the things you might recommend people listening in do, I have a question about another ingredient and that's formaldehyde. That's another one, the one with the hydrochloric acid and the mercury and stuff that I've seen mentioned a lot. Now I personally used to work with formaldehyde a lot, nasty, stinky stuff, when I was an anatomy TA and used to dissect bodies in anatomy lab and still have a little bit of a gag reflex with that strong smell of formaldehyde. But at the same time, I do know that the body makes a little bit of its own formaldehyde and I'm wondering how damaging formaldehyde is and what the deal is with formaldehyde and vaccines. Can you explain?
Stephanie: Yeah. I mean formaldehyde is also toxic and also problematic. And again, because it's being delivered directly to the system rather than going through the gut, and it is produced in the gut. In fact, it's produced by bacteria in response to glyphosate in the gut, which is very interesting to me. So I think that there's more formaldehyde being produced in the gut, people who are exposed to glyphosate in their food. And formaldehyde is toxic and it will actually cause a whole, it's part of the whole contributing, there's a bunch of things that will contribute to this encephalopathy that you get, it can end up with seizures. You have this brain reaction that can really mess up your brain and end up with autism after you're all done.
This happens, so the anaphylactic shock that happens in response sometimes to vaccines very rarely, and it's basically the brain on fire. And formaldehyde, hypochlorite, glutamate, there's other things too. Oh, ammonia. Ammonia's another one. So all of those will contribute, and also hypoxia, which basically means insufficient oxygen, and also insufficient glucose. So all of these factors will work towards triggering this anaphylactic shock or an encephalopathy, which is a swelled brain. You get water retention in the brain and you get vicious headaches, and it can end up with seizures and high fever, I mean all of these things are connected to this encephalopathy, which is sort of an immune reaction to this complex of different chemicals that are showing up in your brain and triggering this response that can end up doing a lot of damage to the brain that you can't recover from. Sometimes you just recover fine, but sometimes you don't. And formaldehyde is one of those things.
Ben: Interesting. So again it's the difference between having it in the bloodstream versus in the gut?
Stephanie: Yeah. In the gut, of course leaky gut's a huge problem and also gut dysbiosis…
Ben: I guess we're assuming here that people, in the presence of a healthy gut, you would be able to do it. But then of course we have all the other issues with kids not getting, for example, I know a big one is kids don't get breast milk and so the leaky junctions in their guts stay open so kids have leaky gut, and then adults can get it from antibiotics and commercial milk and everything else.
Stephanie: Absolutely. And antibiotics, I'm glad you brought that up because of course antibiotics, you know that the animals are fed antibiotics, the cows, so it can be in the meat that you eat. But also glyphosate is patented as an antibiotic. It's patented as an anti-microbial agent. It kills most microbes, preferentially kills the good bacteria and allows the pathogens to overgrow. So I think that this massive problem we're having today with gut issues, we've got celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, leaky gut, all these things, acid reflux, I think glyphosate is a major contributor to that.
Ben: Now what about these alternative vaccination schedules or kind of spreading out vaccines over a longer period of time, doing things like that. The reason I ask this question is not necessarily because you haven't done some good convincing that vaccines in the first place are probably something that we might want to reconsider, but because a lot of people are either under pressure, or the schools that their kids are going to are giving them a hard time as far as vaccinations go. Like do you mitigate any of the damage by, say, spreading things out over a really long period of time. Like I know Dr. Sears, for example, has his alternative vaccination schedule where you're going for a longer period of time or skipping certain vaccines. What are some of the best practices here if someone were, say, still going to get a vaccination or still going to have their children get one?
Stephanie: Absolutely. It's hard for people to suddenly decide that it's fine if I don't vaccinate my child. We're so conditioned to believe that they have to, that it's part of growing up that they have to have these vaccines. People get very nervous about not doing it at all. Slowing it down is a marvelous thing to do because getting it early is much more treacherous than getting it late. And also in early life, the immune system is not even developed yet. So often it's wasted. I think the hepatitis B at birth is an insane idea and I would not support anybody getting hepatitis B at birth, which is required in the United States. Hepatitis B contains a significant amount of aluminum, and I just can't imagine anything worse than a child being born and the first thing they get is a dose of aluminum in their blood. I think it's crazy. And it's not even a risk, you know. I mean hepatitis B is something that, it's a genetic, it's a sexually transmitted disease. I mean that kid's not going to have a problem with it, you know? So it's stupid. I think it's really…
Ben: Yeah. If someone is, say, working in a hospital later on in life where they're going to be say exposed to hepatitis B, is it then a time that you would want to consider getting a vaccination or are you saying don't get it, period?
Stephanie: At this point in my life, I have become so negative about vaccines that it's hard for me to imagine any of them are useful. But I do think that maybe to the extreme a positions at stake, it's certainly the modern world. I mean I'm hoping that, what I'm picturing will happen in the future is that more and more people will delay the vaccines, more and more people will decide not to get certain vaccines, and we'll get some of these diseases coming back, and then people will panic. I mean we'll have a sort of back and forth period. But on average, we'll move towards less vaccination should over time because we'll see the harm being done. I mean there's also all these other, not just the autism, but ADHD, and allergies, asthma, all these skin conditions, eczema, all these problems that kids are having today that they didn't have in the past. When I was a child, I didn't know anybody with these problems. Any of them. Certainly including ADHD. None of them. We're just putting up…
Ben: And are you really convinced that that's because of the glyphosate exposure, GMOs, and vaccines versus us just being more aware that they exist?
Stephanie: I'm absolutely convinced that it is a real problem. Absolutely.
Ben: To a certain extent, I think with something like ADD, I'm looking at my office window right now and I've got two six year old boys standing out in the snow, and they're around, throwing logs at each other. Literally. Like logs about half the size of their bodies. And it's like if my kids were in some settings, they would probably be diagnosed with ADD, and I don't necessarily think it's because my kids have been exposed to glyphosate or something like that. But in an era where we're able to diagnose things like that, do you think that diagnoses are partially going up just because of awareness and the fact that ADD now exist?
Stephanie: I don't. No, no. I think that actually diagnoses isn't going down. I think that it's worse than what we're diagnosing. Because we're under pressure in the school system to save money. And every time you diagnose a child with, for example, autism, it's going to be a huge budget increase in the school system. And budgets are breaking. You can't educate the mainstream because you've got so many kids that are sick that you're dumping all the money into. You're going to be on a poverty budget in the school system. This is going what's to happen shortly because the autism rate's going to continue to go up exponentially. There's going to be a break point beyond which we simply can't cope anymore. And we need to make drastic changes right now.
And I would say two things. One is to reduce the vaccines. And as you say, slow down the schedule, but I would say eliminate any that you think are not as useful as the others. Of course for me, get rid of the MMR, the measles, mumps, rubella. Because when I was a kid, we didn't get those. We caught the diseases and it was fine. I remember getting the measles. It was wonderful. I had a two week vacation from school and I was hardly sick at all. We need to recognize that kids need to get these diseases in order to have a healthy immune system. That's how you make your immune system healthy. What we're doing is making the immune system sick by going the exact opposite direction, not allowing them to get these usually harmless childhood diseases. The few people who died are kids who are very sick to begin with. It's sort of a weeding out process. It's cruel maybe to say that, but kids are dying from vaccines as well. So it's not like you're preventing death.
Ben: I guess I've got one other kind of thought experiment question for you. Let's say that you had a baby today or you were given a baby to take care of, I think I can pretty safely say that you would not be vaccinating them. But would you do anything, would you use, I mean there are all sorts of things out there, like homeopaths, and essential oils, and all these type of things. Or do you just like give them real food, and let them get sick, and come what may?
Stephanie: Yeah. As I told you, I don't take supplements. I take only one supplement, which is not oral. I soak in Epsom salt baths. I really believe in sulfate, as I've told you, as the key problem. Epsom salts are terrific. You should just throw some…
Ben: I actually use magnesium sulfate.
Stephanie: That's the same thing. Yeah, magnesium sulfate is Epsom salts. Of course sulfur hot springs are even better. When I'm Taiwan, I frequent the sulfur hot springs there, which are great. You can get sulfate soaked up through your skin and then that's a really easy way to get it delivered to your body because it's difficult to transport sulfate starting with the gut. And there's all these sulfate transporters that are derailed by glyphosate. So it's a really mess for sulfate. For example, vitamin D deficiency causes sulfate flushing out of the kidneys. And glyphosate induces vitamin D deficiency by disrupting the enzyme in the liver that activated vitamin D. So I think that's why we have a vitamin D deficiency epidemic today, and that's going to correspond to a sulfate deficiency epidemic, which of course no one's noticing because people are not studying it. I mean there's very few people who are studying sulfate. I don't know if that's…
Ben: Just one more time, really quickly, 'cause I know some people might have a difficult time wrapping their heads around this. Can you explain that link between sulfate and vitamin D deficiency one more time?
Stephanie: Yes. In the kidney, vitamin D signals the kidney not to throw sulfate out through the urine. So if there isn't enough vitamin D, the kidney will throw sulfate out through the urine. It will just get rid of it, and that would result in a sulfate deficiency problem. And vitamin D needs to be activated, it gets activated, it actually is very interesting 'cause it's produced in the skin and responds to sunlight. It's activated in the liver, and is step one, and is activated more in the kidney, step two. Both of those enzymes that activate it are cytochrome p450 enzymes, which have been show to be disrupted by glyphosate in rat studies. So glyphosate is inhibiting the enzymes that activate the vitamin D, which is, I mean if you look at the CDC Hospital Discharge Data, a huge increase in vitamin D deficiency since 2005. It's just skyrocketing, vitamin D deficiency.
And everyone's saying, “Oh, everyone's taking vitamin D pills now,” because they're aware of this deficiency problem. And again we don't seem to, we just keep defining the new normal. Like, “Oh, yeah. I'm allergic to wheat.” “Oh, yeah. I'm allergic to wheat too.” I mean everyone's allergic to wheat. Okay, that's fine. Why don't we think that's weird? And then, “Oh, I've got vitamin D deficiency.” “Oh, yeah. So do I.” Everyone is allergic to wheat, everyone's got vitamin D deficiency, and people aren't questioning what is it in the environment that's causing these problems. And I say the answer is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
Ben: Interesting. So sulfur deficiencies and elimination of glyphosate would be the two big things to address versus just taking a bunch of vitamin…
Stephanie: Absolutely. Get rid of the glyphosate. Eat lots of garlic. Also eat foods that have, colorful vegetables and fruits because they have polypenols, which help to transport the sulfate, and also eating a lot of cholesterol containing foods because cholesterol helps to transport sulfate, and getting out in the sunlight because then you can produce and we have a paper that talks about synthesizing sulfate in the skin in response to sunlight, which is why I worship the sun. Taking a vitamin D pill is not going to give you the sulfate, but sitting out on the sun, you'll get both the vitamin D and the sulfate. And the sulfate is a more important, then you're getting through sunlight exposure, not the vitamin D. Which is why all the experiments have failed. They recognize that places that have a lot of sun, they have a lot less health issues, lower cancer rates. I mean all kinds of things. MS are beneficial, lower rates in sunny places. And then they translate that immediately into, “Oh, yeah. Take your vitamin D pill.” That does not work.
Ben: Yeah. I mean I try and just get cumulative vitamin D, like right now you and I are recording this interview, and I'll have about a five to 10 minute break before my next appointment, and I will literally open the door to my office, walk outside, and not only stand out in the sun, but just do other little things that help to mitigate the effects of being indoors all day. Like all focus my eyes off in the distance, off in the horizon 'cause I've been staring at a computer screen two feet from my head, swing my arms around and get some blood flowing, get some fresh air, get all those negative ions. There are all sorts of things…
Stephanie: Grounding by walking barefoot.
Ben: Yeah. Exactly. So interesting.
Stephanie: Right now I'm outside. I'm here in Hawaii, it's a beautiful sunny day. I'm outside. Can you hear birds chirping? I've got a bird feeder right beside, lots of birds. It's wonderful. And I've got a wonderful… I'm soaking up the sun. I mean I don't think you can get enough sun exposure. It's what will give you health. That's why I don't get the flu. You know, it will make you healthy.
Ben: Wow.
Stephanie: And it's free!
Ben: Well I could talk to you forever Stephanie, and it sounds like there's all sorts of different segues that we could get on, but this information that you've given vaccines today is really helpful. And if you're listening in right now, you can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/vaccines, that's bengreenfieldfitness.com/VACCINES, I'll put a link to Stephanie's research page, I'll also put a link to that book by Suzanne Humphries that she talked about, as well as a list of foods that contain glyphosate, the VAERS database that we discussed, and any other helpful links for you. And then if you have thoughts, comments, feedback, again, I know this is a controversial topic, but I'm all about discussion, so just leave a comment on the show it's over there bengreenfieldfitness.com/vaccines if you have your own thoughts to add. So Stephanie, thanks so much for your time today and for coming on the call.
Stephanie: Thank you. It was delightful.
Ben: Alright, folks. This is Ben Greenfield and Stephanie Seneff signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.
In Podcast #305, I broached the controversial topic of vaccines by discussing alternative vaccination schedules. That set off a firestorm of discussion on the Facebook page and my Twitter feed, so in today’s episode I’ve decided to revisit the topic, and you’re about to take a deep dive into the world of vaccines, learn the shocking truth about vaccinations, and get everything you need to know to make an educated choice about vaccines.
My guest on today’s show is Stephanie Seneff, who is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation: developing a computational model for the human auditory system, understanding human language so as to develop algorithms and systems for human computer interactions, as well as applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to gene predictions.
But in recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology. She is concentrating mainly on the relationship between nutrition and health. Since 2011, she has written over a dozen papers (7 as first author) in various medical and health-related journals on topics such as modern day diseases (e.g., Alzheimer, autism, cardiovascular diseases), analysis and search of databases of drug side effects using NLP techniques, and the impact of nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins on human health.
How the history of vaccinations is much, much different than what we’ve been led to believe…
Why kids actually need to get measles, mumps and rubella…
How vaccines can cause a sulfate deficiency and why that’s a problem…
The truth about the Andrew Wakefield, vaccines and autism scandal…
Why mercury and aluminum aren’t really a problem when it comes to MMR vaccines, and what really is the problem…
What you need to know about ingredients like thimerosal and formaldehyde…
Alternatives to vaccines for yourself, for children and for babies…
Resources from this episode:
Suzanne Humphries – Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History (book)
List of foods that contain glyphosate, including corn, soy, canola and sugar beets (article)
VAERs database of adverse reactions to vaccinates (website)