Kentucky.

Tonight I'm Renee Shaw, and we thank you so much for joining us this evening.

Our topic tonight vaccines and medications.

Tonight we've assembled a panel of physicians to take a deep dive into these critical health issues.

There are different perspectives on vaccine and health policies.

And those perspectives are represented here.

This evening on September 22nd, the Trump administration announced it was discouraging pregnant women from taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, because of possible links or connections to autism.

It was a move denounced by many in the scientific community, who say the evidence of a link or causation just isn't there.

President Donald Trump has also questioned vaccine safety, suggesting changes in how children receive vaccinations and when they get them.

As vaccine supporters continue to say that overwhelming evidence shows vaccines save lives.

To discuss all this, we have three guests in our Lexington studio this evening Doctor Michael K paddock, a pediatric hospitalist at Kentucky Children's Hospital and past president of the Kentucky Medical Association.

Doctor Coy Flowers, an obstetrician gynecologist and former chair of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Kentucky, and doctor Molly Rutherford, a primary care physician, addiction specialist and senior fellow with the Independence Medical Alliance.

And joining us by Skype from Saint Petersburg, Florida, doctor Kimberly BIS, an obstetrician gynecologist and also a senior fellow with the Independence Medical Alliance.

We thank them for being with us this evening.

We do want to hear from you.

So we welcome you to send your questions and comments by X, formerly Twitter at Pub Affairs KET.

Send an email to Katie tonight at ket.org or use the web form at ket.org tonight.

Or you can simply give us a call at one 800 494 7605.

Once again, a welcome to all of our guests in the studio.

And for Doctor BIS, thank you for joining us from Saint Petersburg, Florida.

So before we hear from the Secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, whom I spoke to just last week about some of these questions, we're going to be teasing out tonight.

I do want to get from the panel.

How do you assess Doctor Flowers, some of the health recommendations of late that have been coming from the white House?

>> Sure.

You know, as an ob gyn who takes care of of patients every single day in the office, but also involved in advocacy and policy work in the state of Kentucky and across the region and country.

It's important to look at science and evidence and data to be able to look at the risk benefit ratio as to each individual treatment, and then in the exam rooms and with individual patients and families, use a shared decision making process to be able to to to educate those individuals on, on, on the data, on the science, on the studies and then be able to tailor it to their own individual needs, for their own family and for their own selves.

>> So what do you think about some of the policy decisions or recommendations that are coming from the Trump administration?

>> So in this day and age, where so many people are tied to social media and a wealth of information coming in, overwhelming amount of information coming in at any minute of the day.

It can be really confusing to be a consumer of health care in 2025.

And so to add any type of of fear factor or anxiety with changes in policies or the questioning of policies or the inference that something is not healthy or safe, whenever we know that the evidence is provides even more anxiety and confusion for patients, and they potentially will make decisions based on faulty information that are not best for them or for their family.

>> Doctor Rutherford, I want to come to you and ask you the same question.

How do you size up some of the recommendations that are coming from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr, and from the Trump administration?

Do you think these are good questions to be asking at this particular time?

>> I do.

I agree with Doctor Coy that it needs to be a decision between the doctor and the patient, and that's actually what the HHS website says.

It says we recommend judicious acetaminophen use, lowest effective dose, shortest duration under medical guidance, tailored to individual risk benefit assessments.

So the the study was based the information is not new.

But the most recent study was a review of 48 different studies.

And 27 of them found kind of an alarming correlation between Tylenol use and pregnancy and autism.

>> So was there a correlation or causation.

>> With any epidemiological study?

You cannot prove causation.

So that's that's the best that we have, especially in pregnant women.

That's often the best that we have.

It's very hard to design a randomized controlled trial in in pregnant women.

>> That's and that's very true.

There needs to be more research that's actually focused on pregnant women so that we have some of these answers.

But we know this answer with Tylenol.

It's been studied over and over and over for over 20 years.

And we know based on the science and the evidence, acetaminophen does not cause autism or other neurological disorders.

Period.

And to imply which is what this administration is doing, that it might that that there could be a link is dangerous for patients for so many other downstream effects in this country.

>> I want to come to Doctor Kuduk, but I also want to point out that even the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr, tried to clarify that it was an association that he was intimating, not a causation or a link.

Do you are those just teasing out words and semantics in your view?

>> Absolutely.

Those words are designed to stoke fear and doubt in people's minds.

In Dry Ridge or in Somerset, that don't have the access to all of the data that physicians and scientists do that study this every single day.

It's purposefully done and it's wrong.

>> Doctor, what do you say?

>> My thought would be, I think we need to wonder why women are taking Tylenol in pregnancy.

So I think if you are feeling if you are pregnant and you are feeling fine, you don't have anything wrong with you.

You don't need to be taking Tylenol.

But if you are taking Tylenol, it's for some reason so.

And if an epidemiologic study you can't really make any.

The draw that many conclusions from it.

You're looking at big chunks of data.

It could be really hard to kind of suss out exactly what's going on.

But I think, you know, we need to look at maybe it's not the Tylenol, maybe it's the diseases that the moms have, the chronic diseases that the moms have, or other things that they have.

You know, infections can cause fever.

Infections are a prime cause of problems in newborn babies and in children.

I think we need to look at those things.

>> Right.

But Tylenol is probably is it considered the most effective pain reliever or fever reducer?

>> It may be the only one that you can take during pregnancy.

You really can't take non-steroidal anti-inflammatories because they do things to the ductus arteriosus and the child.

>> So.

So what does that mean?

Please explain.

>> I apologize.

For throwing.

Out some.

>> Medical terms.

That's my role is to make sure that we talk and accessible.

>> A medical educator, I was hoping not to do much medical education on the show tonight, but yeah, that's actually an important duct, which actually helps preserve the fetal circulation while the baby is inside developing.

So it closes when babies are out so that they can use their lungs.

>> Doctor, I want to come to you and ask you, what are your thoughts about particularly about the Tylenol issue and the the language that we're getting about?

There could be some connection to autism.

Do you believe this?

>> Yeah.

I didn't hear that.

You know, we shouldn't be giving pregnant women Tylenol at all.

I just heard that maybe we should consider that something we've considered safe for many, many years may be associated with some, you know, conditions moving forward.

I mean, if you read the package insert of the Tylenol, you know, product, the the classification and the FDA class is class C, meaning the studies that the Tylenol company did was on rats.

And by the way, what they look for is fetal malformations in the rats.

They're not following these rat babies and seeing if they develop in normal fashion moving forward.

And they also comment in the in their own package insert that most of the safety data has been epidemiologic meaning looking backwards not forwards in time.

And we all know that that can be flawed with other confounding issues and biases.

I, I have been a practicing obstetrics for over 31 years.

I did tell a lot of my patients to take Tylenol, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't allow that to be given to pregnant women, but I just think we shouldn't be so quick to discard some findings that the government is saying they see without maybe looking into that a little bit deeper, maybe saying pregnant women should take Tylenol when they have a fever of a certain level, not when it's just 99°F, etc.

There are other ways to bring down a fever other than taking medication, but I just think to quickly jump and just discard what's been said.

I think that can be very dangerous.

>> So you are still you still recommend Tylenol use for your pregnant patients?

>> I mean, in certain indications, I feel that it can be given.

I think maybe some of the data is based on people that were taking this in long term.

And and just just for clarification, pregnant women can take ibuprofen, you know, not a lot of it and not on a continued basis and not close to term when they're going to deliver.

But, you know, we usually recommend Tylenol, but maybe some of this data is on women who took it for a prolonged period of time.

But I will say Acog was quick to generate a statement the following day and quoted a study that was published in Jama last year.

But if you look at that study, a supplemental table of that study did show a possible correlation with use of acetaminophen and autism and ADHD.

So even the the reference that was utilized did show a possible correlation.

>> Doctor flowers, I want you to comment because you have been associated as the Kentucky Acog, as they call it for short.

>> Sure.

That's a misinterpretation of that study.

That study was over was a study of over 200,000 children who had been exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy, and there was absolutely no causal link to autism, ADHD, or other neurological developmental disorders.

Period.

>> The other thing the study did was it controlled for siblings.

So as we know, there's a lot of evidence that's accumulating that says autism is related to genetics.

So there's an increasing accumulation of that.

So and that study controlled for siblings.

So when they looked at the sibling controls there was no change.

>> Right.

Well we got a chance to talk with the Kentucky secretary of the cabinet for Health and Family Services, Doctor Steven Stack, last week about his views on vaccines and the use of Tylenol by pregnant women.

And here's what he had to say.

>> Well, there's long been a subset of people who have their concerns or skepticism, right?

That's that's always the case.

There's a small percentage who will feel that for whatever reasons, they lack confidence in or certainty in the recommendations that are given by their health care providers or other experts, that's always the case.

What's unique now is that there's a growing number of people who are becoming uncertain, because the very basis of fact and reality is being distorted for them.

They're being told information that is objectively wrong.

It's objectively false.

Take, for example, the Tylenol issue that's recently come up.

Tylenol is one of the only medications felt to be generally safe for women with fever and pain who are pregnant.

One of the only things generally felt to be safe, and now they've been told in no uncertain terms don't take it.

Just tough it out.

That's negligent, that's reckless.

It's wrong.

It's going to cause people to get hurt that don't need to get hurt, or people to suffer that don't need to suffer.

And now when women who are pregnant go to see their physicians, some portion of them are going to be skeptical of their physician when they recommend.

What modern medical science has long said is one of the safest medications they can use to help control fever and pain in pregnancy, which is acetaminophen or Tylenol.

>> Is there a study or a series of studies that point to the the suspect nature of acetaminophen use during pregnancy?

I mean, it had to have started from somewhere.

What is the origin story of this speculation?

>> Yeah, there are lots of studies about acetaminophen in pregnancy.

One of the things in studies for pregnant women, because it's considered not to be ethical, to withhold treatment from one half of women and, and test one half and withhold from the other half.

And so there's not great research specifically on pregnant women because of liability and ethical reasons.

So what we have to rely on is what we call observational studies, where we look at large numbers of pregnant women who have made their own choices and then see how they responded differently to different choices.

Those raise other problems, though, because a lot of other variables can come into play that confuse or confound the interpretation.

There have been many observational studies for women who are pregnant using acetaminophen.

They have.

None of them showed a causal relationship where acetaminophen has in any way contributed to or caused autism, and one of the largest ones with millions of women in Scandinavia showed absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the diagnosis of autism and the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy.

It is entirely irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

What we have now, Renee, used to be that if you had 100 hundred scientific studies in 99 of them all lined up in a cluster and one was an outlier, you would say, well, that's the outlier.

But but scientific evidence says this is clearly the right choice.

We have a group of people now that are saying that one outlier, that's the truth.

All the other 99 are lying and hiding something.

This is the truth.

It's entirely backwards.

And it's like I said, it's going to cause people to get hurt.

>> All of this is consequential not just to access, but to affordability, to vaccinations, to medications.

Talk about how this becomes an access issue if it keeps progressing the way we see this conversation progressing.

>> So if this keeps progressing, people who don't need to get sick, get sick, instead of paying pennies to, you know, relatively speaking, to immunize people or give simple and safe medications like acetaminophen or Tylenol.

In pregnant women, what we end up doing is having complications.

You have kids who get diseases that we had previously eliminated, and they end up in the hospital, you know, with dehydration or pneumonia or problems they didn't need to have.

You get a small number of them who die.

And that's a real tragedy because the immunization could have prevented that entirely.

You have elderly folks who, if they become skeptical and they don't get recommended immunizations, things for Covid or the flu, end up in the hospital or end up in an ICU or end up on a ventilator, or end up deceased because they get serious diseases that they might otherwise have been protected against.

Renee.

I would say in human history and all of our human history, and maybe there's 10,000 years of recorded human history one way or the other.

The average human life expectancy is recently is 1900 worldwide, was about 32 years of age in the United States.

It was probably in the late 40s.

Over the last one and a quarter centuries, 125 years or so, life expectancy has more than doubled globally and increased by 30 or more years in the United States.

That's all because of science.

It's all because of medicine.

If you want to see what it looks like to eat an organic diet, not see a doctor, and have no medicines, all you have to do is go back to 1900 and we can all die under the age of 50 on average, because that's what we had before that.

Antibiotics.

Penicillin first came around in 1940s.

The first antihypertensive medication in the 1950s, immunizations.

We had some back at 1800.

You know, when George Washington immunized his troops against smallpox.

So that's not brand new.

But the more commonly used ones, really, the 40s, 50s, 60s is when those really started to emerge.

Modern medical science has been what has made it possible, along with sanitation and other things like that, to have longer, fuller, healthier lives.

>> Is there any benefit, in your view, of having this healthy skepticism about modern medicine, about vaccinations, about long policies that we've had and have adopted, that have given way to this longer life expectancy and better health outcomes?

Is there some benefit to having a skeptical conversation about it?

>> I think there's always benefit for people asking questions.

I think there's benefit for experts who analyze the same data and reach different conclusions.

To have an informed discussion and debate about where truth may most likely lie.

I think all of us need to be willing to revisit our conclusions when presented with evidence that suggests that our conclusions should be adjusted.

I think that's the scientific process.

I think that's just the hallmark of an enlightened, educated society.

So yes, there's always a role for that kind of discussion.

That the challenge comes in is when you have real experts who have studied and devoted their entire lives to studying and trying to find truth.

And when they make recommendations based on a scientific method and do it in an open, transparent way.

What really gets alarming is when we now have our very public institutions deconstructed, when we have experts fired from panels and replaced sometimes with cranks, and we have people who are substituting quackery for real science and doing it all in a very opaque way, where they're not consulting experts and not dealing in the open.

That stuff is a recipe for real harm for all of us.

>> Doctor, I want to come to you and ask you to give us your reactions to what Doctor Stack just shared.

>> Yeah, I, I think that there needs to be more dialog because there's very much a in the in the last few years, there's the instant rejection of some things that are suggested.

And again, I didn't hear from the announcement last week or whenever it was, but I'm times escaped me a bit that we should absolutely not be providing vaccines or give pregnant women Tylenol.

I just think we need to be able to question these things and not be called a quack.

I think that's pretty offensive.

There's a lot of things in my years of doing obstetrics for over three decades that we don't do any longer.

We don't provide IV alcohol for preterm labor.

We don't put women on bedrest.

We don't allow them to smoke.

I mean, look, look how long, how many decades it took to prove that smoking caused lung cancer.

Doctors and pregnant women used to advertise cigarettes.

I mean, things change in medicine, and we should be able to question and not just instantaneously ignore something that's said and call it quackery.

>> Doctor flowers.

>> Yeah, she's she's got it all backwards there.

This is the problem.

The implication is, is that those of us who are physicians, who are clinicians and researchers and scientists at heart, that we create a policy and then we shut the research factory down.

We it's dogma now that we don't think it's always an evolving topic that we want to continually research.

We are it's a nonstop 24 over seven, 365 process that we evaluate what we're doing every single day in every single, every other patient that comes through our office.

We're reexamining what we do.

And so the implication that, oh, you know, we're quacks.

No.

Whenever you put something out there that is not been proven to be a solid advice or protocol or procedure, there are implications.

For example, I have held the hand of patients who have had fevers of 102, 103, 104 who miscarry in the first trimester.

I've been there with them.

There are so many situations where just the simple use of Tylenol can help patients avoid fetal neurologic development disorders later on in life, miscarriage and other things.

And so for the implication, it's a show a lot with this administration.

It's a show they like.

They like the attention.

Be smart about it.

Continue the research behind the scenes.

And if there's something that's concrete, move forward with it.

But don't scare people into making decisions that are not in their best interest.

>> Doctor Rutherford, do you think that this administration is scaring people?

Fear mongering?

>> I think I don't like to get political, but I think the there are many of the administrations have been guilty of that.

Do you think it was appropriate for President Biden to tell people they were facing a winter of illness and death if they didn't get the Covid 19 vaccine?

I didn't get the Covid 19 vaccine.

Four years of four winters of death.

Here I am.

>> So I did, Renee, and it kept me alive.

>> I think, you know, I think that that that is what we should be talking about.

Why don't people trust the medical establishment?

Why don't people trust our institutions?

They don't trust those institutions, and they don't trust their doctors because they were lied to over and over during the pandemic.

They were lied to about six foot distancing.

Turns out that was just made up.

They were lied to about masking.

They were lied to about the how the pandemic came about.

It was created in a lab.

They were lied to about the efficacy and the safety of the vaccine.

I'm on the board of an organization called react 19, which is comprised of at least 37,000 Americans who were injured by the Covid vaccine, and they are being ignored by the medical establishment.

Why do you think I'm on the board?

Why do you think I see patients who are who are damaged by Covid and the vaccine?

Because I'm independent, I don't have a job to lose.

Nobody's going to fire me for telling the truth.

>> Did you ever recommend the vaccination, the Covid vaccination for those who were immunocompromised or had other preexisting conditions that could put them at greater risk if they were to contract the disease?

>> At the very beginning, when the vaccines came out in December of 2020, I cautiously recommended to a few patients, including, unfortunately, my elderly parents.

But within 4 to 6 weeks it was very obvious that the vaccine didn't work.

I had people coming to me in my office who got the vaccine and developed Covid within two weeks, so it didn't work.

And then secondly, I was seeing people who were injured.

I had many young patients who got the vaccine and came to me with shingles and with neurologic damage.

I had a I have a few patients who got atrial fibrillation, and we know they knew in February of 2021 that that vaccine caused myocarditis in young men.

And they and they buried it.

And as a result, a friend of mine lost his son.

He got the Pfizer vaccine and died five days later when he was 16 years old.

And our government buried that information.

So I don't blame anybody for not trusting the medical establishment, public health officials or any government entity.

I'm not taking medical advice from Joe Biden.

I'm not taking medical advice from Donald Trump.

But this study came out of Harvard.

It's not like Secretary Kennedy and President Trump just brought it out of the ether.

It was a study done at Harvard.

>> Concerning the Tylenol.

Yes, yes.

I want to go to you, doctor.

What do you think about talk about the Covid vaccinations.

We'll start there and then.

>> Everybody's experience with Covid is a lot different.

My experience was different than other people.

I was board chair of the Kentucky Medical Association at the time, and all this really hit.

And I remember sitting on a conference call with some physicians in Bergamo, Italy, and this is the very beginning of the pandemic, before the country had shut down.

And we got a chance to have some question and answer with the folks that were over there, because we heard about this new disease.

I followed it over time, and it was in China, I noticed, well, you know, if Wuhan is putting up a really big hospital in a week, this must be a big deal, right?

And yeah, we got to talk to some of the folks that were in Italy.

We found out, yes, this is a respiratory illness.

It's supportive care.

We asked them what they did for advanced illnesses.

They said we put patients on ventilators.

And we asked them, did you have enough ventilators?

They said, no.

And I think that's a physician's worst nightmare is to have to decide who gets a life saving treatment, who doesn't.

So that really changed my expectations of Covid and what it was about.

So I understand that, yes, people got mixed messages of many different things and Covid made you sick.

It made it made some people deathly ill.

It killed people.

The life expectancy in our country was down two years during the pandemic.

Hopefully it's on the way back up, but and other people maybe got a runny nose or no symptoms at all.

So I think it was very crazy in the way it did that.

>> So do you believe vaccines the Covid vaccine works.

>> The Covid vaccine is not going to prevent illness, but it will prevent you from getting critically ill.

And I have personal experience with that.

I brought I made it a long time without getting Covid, and I finally brought it home for a medical conference.

Last year I had 103 fever.

I had shaking chills.

My wife had to change the bed a couple times a night.

My my night sweats were so bad, and those were all the symptoms that we would see in a hospitalized patient before they went to the ICU.

>> You were vaccinated.

>> I was vaccinated, I honestly believe I would not be talking to you today without the vaccine.

>> Doctor Rutherford, to say that a vaccine doesn't work, is it because they still got Covid in your experience, or because the disease that they contracted wasn't life threatening?

I think Doctor Stack had said on our airwaves on many times that it wasn't perhaps going to prevent getting the disease.

It just prevented the deadly, possibly the deadly consequences of it.

>> Right.

They changed the narrative once they realized that it didn't stop transmission.

But Pfizer executives under oath admitted that they never tested it for transmission to prevent transmission.

And the original Pfizer trial actually showed a higher all cause mortality in the treatment arm than in the placebo arm.

So I we can disagree, but in my opinion, the evidence is that it's not effective and it's definitely not safe.

If you look at the various data, there are over 1,600,000 adverse event reports in the various data for the Covid 19 vaccine.

So I don't understand why it's still on the market, to be honest.

>> That range from what the from kind of.

>> 1 in 1 study by Freeman et al.

It was 1 in 800 people had a serious adverse event to that vaccine that they had to seek medical care.

And and I know people say you can't rely on various data, but most of the analyzes, including by the Institute of Medicine, found that there's actually understates the damage from from vaccinations.

>> Does this cause you to question other vaccines as well, not just Covid.

>> It definitely led me to look deeper into that issue, and I was not aware prior to Covid that there's there's there was an act passed in 1986 that protected pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines from any liability if someone is injured by a vaccine.

When I learned that, just my critical thinking went into overdrive and sort of alarmed me because how are they?

How are people to get relief when they are injured?

And the whole reason we have react 19 is because people are not getting any help from our government.

So Doctor Joe Walzog, he's an orthopedic surgeon in Ohio.

He helped found react 19.

He was injured by the vaccine.

He got transverse myelitis.

>> Which is.

>> Oh, I'm sorry, it's.

A it's a neurologic condition.

It's an autoimmune condition that causes you to lose feeling sometimes.

And some people aren't able to walk.

And just.

Brian Dressen is another injured individual.

She was injured in the AstraZeneca trial.

I take care of Maddie Gary, who was injured in the Pfizer trial at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and they gaslit her family and made her think that it was all in her, her mind.

And she still doesn't walk to this day.

>> So doctor bis care to weigh in at this particular juncture?

>> Yeah.

I'm glad Molly brought up the original Pfizer trial, because if you look at the absolute risk reduction of severe Covid in the, you know, in the results of the study, it was 0.037%.

So that's not very effective.

If a patient asks you if I take this injection, what are the risks or what is the success, that it's going to prevent the infection.

It's not even 1%.

And there were no pregnant women enrolled in that trial, by the way.

Men were told to wear two condoms.

A woman was supposed to be on an adequate form of birth control.

There were, however, some accidental pregnancies during the trial, and out of those women, it was a 12% miscarriage rate, which most of my obstetric colleagues would say that falls under the realm of normal.

However, Nair et al.

In 2022 published a study showing that the average miscarriage rate in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy is actually 5 to 6%.

So that was almost double a normal miscarriage rate, and that should have raised a red flag.

And when we when the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the society for Maternal Fetal Medicine made their joint statement in July of 2021 saying these vaccines were safe and effective, this was not based on any long term study.

Granted, we supposedly didn't have time to do that.

And, you know, they were telling us to inject every patient that was thinking of getting pregnant, pregnant or breastfeeding based on not very safe data.

If anything, there were signals suggesting there might be some danger.

>> Doctor flowers, I'll allow you to respond.

>> Sure.

So during Covid, along with the flu vaccine, there's, what, 43 to 47,000 people who die in this country every year from the flu, the the highest per capita rate of deaths in flu and in Covid were in pregnant patients who are immunocompromised or in their pregnancy.

And we were seeing with the onset of Covid pregnant patients dying at alarming rates from Covid throughout the country.

And so, absolutely, we didn't have an extensive research on the Covid vaccine at that point.

And we want pregnant patients to be to have access to the full spectrum of medical treatments that are out there to save lives.

We also were seeing, I think, the first birth registry study that came out was from Mississippi, showing that women who contracted Covid during pregnancy were at higher risk for a whole host of things, including severe preeclampsia and eclampsia, intrauterine fetal death, spontaneous death, intrauterine growth restriction, all kinds of things.

And so the American College of OBGYN did the smart thing, which was to allow women to have the choice to be able to take Covid and to say that that based on the data that we had, that it was safe for them to take in pregnancy.

>> Doctor, I think you would like to respond.

>> Yes.

I would like to point out that Beth Pinellas, who is a high risk obstetrician in the Houston area, published a study in May of 2022.

She completed that study a year prior.

She studied 23,574 women aged 15 to 44, had two arms where half were pregnant, half were not pregnant, admitted to the hospital with severe Covid and with statistical significance, showed that if you were not pregnant, you had a higher rate of mortality.

So I feel that there may even be something protective in patients when they're pregnant.

With regards to Covid, I was chief of staff of my hospital, which is a high risk referral center.

I was on many calls with many health departments across the Tampa Bay area during that early time.

We had not an increased risk of maternal death.

As a matter of fact, we had no maternal deaths.

At my institution that delivers almost 4000 babies a year.

If there had been an increase in maternal mortality from Covid in the surrounding communities, I would have been made aware of that or been aware of that at that time.

The other thing that Doctor Flowers brought up was everything he just stated was increased.

If you were to contract Covid infection, I actually, as did my anesthesia colleagues and nurse midwife colleagues and labor and delivery nurse colleagues noticed all of those things seem to increase after 2021, when the injections were rolled out.

And as a matter of fact, in our green journal, there was an article published showing that pre-term labor rates were not increased at all when you compared 2020 to 2019.

In a huge population of patients.

So I think, you know, we don't want women to become fearful and we don't want to, you know, create fear when we make recommendations.

But I think a lot of things pregnant women were told really scared them into getting this injection.

You know, we tell our women, don't smoke, don't eat tuna fish, don't color your hair.

But go get this brand new injection.

That's not like any vaccine they had ever had in the past.

And, you know, I think that a lot of that was based on fear, because I'm sure Doctor Flowers would admit that over the years we've both practiced, it's sometimes hard to get pregnant women to take any medication, especially aspirin, if they have a history of pre-eclampsia, which is a high blood pressure condition in pregnancy.

Aspirin has been shown to prevent that in a subsequent pregnancy.

We have many patients that don't want to take that because they don't want to take anything that's going to harm their baby, but 65% of my pregnant population willingly lined up and got this injection because they were very afraid.

>> Doctor flowers, I'll let you respond.

>> Yeah.

You know, my mother and her eight sisters raised me.

And in rural West Virginia.

And my dad will say, your mother didn't take anything unless she grew it in pregnancy.

So that's the perspective that I take with me to medicine.

You do the least possible to be able to get the desired effect for your patients.

The least invasive, the least risky, all those things.

But at some point you have to be able to have a full armamentarium of of of options to be able to offer patients, given their particular individual situation and going back to Tylenol.

And we can we can we can correlate this to the vaccine discussion.

Whenever you throw out something in a public forum like is being done from Washington, D.C.

from the Oval Office, and you scare the heck out of people, you're taking important tools away from physicians because patients come into the conversation with such a bias that's already there that they may have have harmful effects because they no longer will even consider something that potentially could be life saving for them.

>> Doctor Rutherford, I'll allow you to respond before we talk a little bit more vaccine injury, I'd like to first talk a little bit more about that.

>> You want to talk about vaccine injury?

>> I do, and if you had a comment to Doctor Flowers.

But I'll go ahead and jump into this because last night, perhaps many may have seen the 60 minutes report on CBS about vaccine injury.

And of course, there is a national vaccine court, which I was not aware of.

Founded in the 1980s, 12,000 Americans have received almost $5 billion in payouts for claiming injury after getting a vaccine.

This really was established after diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or DTP DTaP vaccine, that there was some negative response to that.

Do you know about this national vaccine court?

>> I do unfortunately they it does the Covid vaccine injured have a whole separate process, which is kind of.

>> So it doesn't go through this same process.

>> No, but I but I am aware and the vaccine actually that federal vaccine court declared in in two separate cases of children I think around 2010 Hannah Poling they they awarded her family $1.5 million and they and they actually acknowledged that her autism was caused by vaccines.

So we have a couple of cases from that very court that acknowledges that an encephalopathy, encephalopathy, which is a brain inflammation, ensued after vaccinations, which later led to autism in in a few children.

So they did find that she had an underlying mitochondrial disorder which, which predisposed her.

Right.

So I think that hopefully we're going to move into a more nuanced discussion with parents and with patients and a more individualized approach.

For example, I have a gene mutation called Mthfr, which.

Which means I have, a I have.

>> Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency.

>> It's an enzyme that helps us process process folate.

And so I don't do it very well because I'm homozygous for which means I have two genes anyway.

So in my case I don't detox very well if, if I'm I have toxins on board.

And so there are children who fall into that category as well.

So I think hopefully eventually we can have a more nuanced discussion with parents.

And we can we can identify the children that maybe should do, you know, take a different approach.

>> Well, because they may already have a predisposition that's, you know, already existing.

Exactly.

It may be not it may be exacerbated by the vaccine because, as the CBS 60 minutes report found, that vaccine injury is hard to quantify, really.

But they say it's been likened to lottery odds and lightning strikes.

So these are rare occurrences that such things do happen.

Would you agree with that?

>> I can shed some light on the whole vaccine court issue.

So that came around in the 70s, because at the time, actually, if you look in journals, look in the Pediatrics journal, some other things they the science at the time accepted that the DTP vaccine caused brain damage.

Okay.

This is they had a medical word for it.

And yeah, this was this was part of what they what they looked at.

So anyway, it turns out that with modern genetic analysis later on, what happens with the DTP vaccine, you would get the DTP vaccine, you'd have fever, and with fever you would have seizures.

And seizures were a marker for other things, perhaps further seizure disorders.

So it turns out that a lot of the people that had issues with the DTP vaccine actually had genetic diseases.

There's something called Dravet syndrome, so that kids would get the DTP vaccine, which is what it's a genetic disease that causes seizures and developmental delays.

So and people said, oh, it's the vaccine.

But actually they had the patient had fever from the vaccine that led to a seizure and that led to the onset of the illness.

So the fever could have just as easily come from the flu or RSV or another infection that's out there.

>> So perhaps testing these children for these types of markers in these genetic disorders or predispositions would be a first step.

>> I think that's true.

Many days we have children that we see in the hospital that we used to say, oh, this person has a seizure disorder.

Now their seizure disorder has a name or they have a genetic mutation that's attached to it.

So there's a strong genetic basis for that.

>> And so a vaccine would not be recommended.

I mean, in many ways that you and Doctor Rutherford are maybe singing from the same.

Perhaps.

>> But I think one of the things I think we have lost totally in this discussion is we have not talked about the diseases we're preventing.

So a lot of people would not argue with me when they said, okay, the decision to get a vaccine, it's risk and benefit, right?

So you're not going to get a Covid vaccine.

I'm going to because I do not want to go to the ICU.

So and that should be my decision.

So but with with the diseases that we're trying to prevent, measles is out in the news.

People know what measles look like.

We see pictures of this.

But measles and some other things, that's not really what I'm worried about.

I'm worried about bacterial meningitis.

Okay.

I'm a hospitalist.

I see and treat kids with bacterial meningitis from time to time.

If parents are not taking vaccines and they're not taking all the vaccines, there's a couple of vaccines out there called Hib and Prevnar, which protect specifically against bacterial meningitis.

We're going to start to see more cases and kids are going to get it because we carry that as adults.

We have Haemophilus influenza B on our person.

We are going to be the person that infects our children.

So I go way back.

So during my intern year at Texas Children's Hospital, we saw a lot of bacterial meningitis.

I think at any given point in time, there are at least two kids in the ICU getting treated acutely for meningitis, which have to be very careful with, and probably another 20 or so on the floor that were getting IV antibiotics.

It was a big hospital, but still, and probably 20 to 25% of kids that survive bacterial meningitis have some sort of hearing loss.

So acquired hearing loss used to be something that was really, really common.

And we just don't see it anymore because we have good vaccines to prevent bacterial meningitis.

So I think we need to talk more about the the illnesses that are here.

You know, polio is something we don't see or hear anymore.

But boy, in the 1950s you can see it.

And it was a big topic of discussion.

The president had it.

And I often wonder what would happen if Salk and Sabin came back today and were in your studio tonight listening to this conversation and, you know, kind of what they would think because they were national heroes at the time for creating that vaccine.

Right.

And we.

>> Do hear some questions about some of these vaccines that doctor is discussing, right?

I mean, hepatitis B, polio vaccines.

I mean, what's your skepticism around any or all of these?

>> Well, one thing that Doctor Stack said was that medicine is is to credit for our increased life expectancy.

Expectancy, excuse me, but from 1900 to 1960, the death rate from measles had already declined by 98%.

The measles vaccine did not become available until 1963.

So really, it's public health measures that should get the credit for a lot of that increase.

>> As what kind of.

>> Sanitation, refrigeration, better nutrition medicine definitely deserves some of the credit.

Antibiotics for sure, but and the hepatitis B vaccine was added to the schedule, to the infant schedule because the high risk groups were not, the uptake in the high risk groups was not satisfactory to our government, so they figured they could could get it on the childhood schedule.

It would protect the company from liability.

Did you know that the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine was studied in 147 children?

And it was they followed those children for five days, five days for the safety studies.

Are you okay with that?

>> Yeah.

>> Actually, I'm okay with that.

I'll tell you, my experience with that is completely different.

And again, I go way back.

So I remember before we were giving the hepatitis B vaccine to infants, one of the things that we we did there was you want to try, you want to give the hepatitis B vaccine early on to prevent vertical transmission.

So if a mom has hepatitis B, the odds they're going to infect their newborn baby are pretty good.

So there are some things that we do at delivery.

We give hepatitis B vaccine.

We give hepatitis B immune globulin to prevent transmission.

Those were both really important.

So so when I was in practice all right.

This was back before electronic records and paper charts.

And okay.

So someone would come in and deliver Saturday night the office is closed.

You don't have access to the mom's hepatitis B records.

You draw a blood sample, it takes a couple hours to run.

The baby comes out.

What do you do?

Right.

We're like, okay, we don't know.

We're not going to get an answer back until Monday or say, you're in working in the hospital where this lab is going to take a while to come back.

You know, we went ahead and give the hepatitis B vaccine, and we gave the H the hepatitis B immune globulin.

And we found out, yeah, we were giving a lot of hepatitis B vaccine to babies and they were doing fine.

So they weren't having any issues.

>> With it.

You can ask risk factors.

You can you can base it on risk factors.

You can still take a history from a patient and find out if the mother was had some high risk behaviors that would put her baby at risk.

You don't just automatically jab a one year old baby.

>> Well, the other thing is.

>> That I think.

>> We've lost sight of the fact that the hepatitis B vaccine and the HPV vaccine are there to prevent cancer.

Cancer.

And if you told me when I started medical school we'd have vaccines against cancer, I would have said, you were crazy.

But we do.

>> And HPV, human papillomavirus talked more about that.

I mean, that's not something that's mandated or recommended for certain youth.

>> Yes, the hepatitis B vaccine, the HPV vaccine, again, we're trying to decrease the viral load of hepatitis or hepatitis HPV, human papillomavirus in the community.

So that's the cause of cervical cancer.

And it makes sense that if you are acquiring the cervical cancer, you are at risk for cervical cancer.

Through acquiring this virus, it makes sense to stop it.

>> But it's recommended as young as nine years old.

>> The whole point is to decrease the burden of the virus in the population.

>> Doctor Rutherford, how do you feel about that?

>> Well, the HPV vaccine is kind of controversial as well.

There have been many reports of injuries from that vaccine, and there are some studies that show that it's not preventing cancer.

So there have been debates among experts that have a lot more credentials than me, where they where people disagree on whether or not to give that vaccine.

>> Is there injury from that vaccine that you're aware of?

>> There are injuries from that vaccine, documented injuries from that vaccine.

You can see and you can if you open a package insert.

And I would encourage parents to do this.

They're available on the FDA website.

You can see all of the reactions that are that are possible.

You can see the ingredients and you can even look at the clinical trial data.

And most people are smart enough to do the math to decide if they if they think it's worth the risk.

And I say that as a mom who who vaccinated both of my kids, I even gave my boys the HPV vaccine.

In hindsight, I would not do that again.

But I just want to come clear that, you know, my mind has been changed from doing a lot of research on this topic, and what bothers me also is that there's a lot of panic and a lot of discussion about replacing the members of ACIp.

That committee.

>> And that committee.

>> That's that's the, the, the committee that with with HHS that discusses vaccines and decides what to do with the childhood schedule.

So they've been meeting lately and and they took the Covid vaccine, for example, off of the childhood schedule.

And they said leave it to individual discretion, which is a good step anyway, the prior to this particular board that that RFK Jr has assembled, there were members of the board with major conflicts of interest.

So they they are getting paid by the very pharmaceutical industries that they are making decisions about that is known.

And that was one of the things that when Bobby Kennedy was running for president, that he talked about, that he wanted to change.

And that is one of the reasons people don't trust those those entities.

And if you if you talk about people that are labeled anti-vax, which I don't like that term, many of them have PhDs, many of them are very highly educated.

And so they go and they do their own research.

So I am really happy that we're finally getting to talk about all of these issues, because it's been taboo for so long.

And, you know, these parents are being treated with contempt sometimes in pediatrician offices.

They're getting kicked out.

Pediatricians won't even take care of these children because they because their parents are skeptical of these vaccines.

So I'm I'm ecstatic that we finally get to talk about it.

>> Yeah.

The wisdom in scrapping the board and replacing with others that we heard the character characterization by Doctor Stack is wasn't as flattering as Doctor Rutherford had just expressed.

>> It was an entirely poor decision to scrap the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices Board.

Everything I just heard again was a spin on on how the health care system is not functioning to be able to best serve patients and their families.

The people that were replaced on ACIp that have now on the go read their resumes, go read where they've come from.

Whatever background, the anti-vaxxers, individuals who who, who have very controversial views outside of scientifically evidence based proven health care benefits for different practices.

>> But they don't have conflicts with being tied to pharmaceutical companies.

>> They're there were most of those individuals who were on ACIp for years and years had to disclose what they what what those their relationships were with individual pharmaceutical companies.

I almost everybody in this country at that level has some type of affiliation with, with an organization, an association, a corporation.

And and I didn't have any issue or problem, nor did the American College of OBGYN in believing in the recommendations they put forward.

I can't point to, and I would challenge anyone to put forward any recommendation, because the implication is when that's said is that these individuals were pocketing money because and being influenced by what pharmaceutical companies wanted them to do, point to something that shows that that's not true.

This is another tactic to stoke fear and doubt in the American public over scientifically proven, data driven protocols and recommendations.

It's wrong.

>> Doctor BS.

>> Well, I think Molly could speak volumes on the fact that the whole opioid crisis we have today is because of the shenanigans that occurred between a pharmaceutical company and the FDA.

But I wanted to bring up the fact that the hepatitis B vaccine, I think in today's age, where we do have electronic records, we have the the ability within an hour to determine if a pregnant woman has hepatitis B infection or previous exposure, if we don't have access to her prenatal records, which we screen all of our pregnant patients for hepatitis B, there's no reason in today's society to be given a less than 24 hour year old baby, the hepatitis B vaccine.

We have all that information.

And now, because a lot of patients are questioning this and they should be able to question this, and they shouldn't be told on the wards that their baby is going to die if they don't get this injection.

That, again, is by fear, and that's coercion.

And a patient cannot make that violates ethics.

And they shouldn't be told that.

But now it's probably going to happen is because the parents are refusing these vaccines in their babies.

We're now going to start vaccinating pregnant women so that we can at least get this in their system and get the antibodies to the baby.

And I just find that incredulous.

>> Well, as we have a little bit more than three minutes remaining, I want to kind of go a round robin.

And Doctor Rutherford, if you want to talk about that, because you are an addiction specialist.

Right?

Right.

Doctor, this was making about you could speak volumes about that pharmaceuticals and the I mean.

>> The people of Kentucky.

I don't understand why the people of Kentucky would, would blanket have blanket trust for pharmaceutical for the pharmaceutical industry.

After how our people were targeted, our doctors were targeted by Purdue Pharma, and it was devastating for our state.

So I just I just encourage people to use their critical thinking.

Look at look what happened.

Like I said in 1986, where they gave these these pharmaceutical companies who make vaccines, they gave them immunity from liability, essentially.

And the the woman who ran the CDC from 2002 to 2009, she was responsible for that Merck Gardasil vaccine being approved largely.

And then she went to work for Merck and has made millions of dollars since.

So I don't know, I'm just more skeptical of those relationships.

>> Yeah.

>> I went to medical school to ease suffering in patients.

I mean, that sounds corny, but that's really kind of why we went to medical school is just to heal and to do better.

And I worry that if we're telling pregnant moms, you can't take Tylenol, you can't do this, you can't do that.

You know, when does when does it stop?

So we're putting all the blame for autism and all these other things on mom, and I just don't think that's fair.

So I would like that to end.

The other thing is, I agree with you, Doctor Rutherford, in terms of, you know, the decision to vaccinate your children, being being a shared thing, it's something that you should talk about the risks and benefits of.

And we're hearing a lot about the risks.

We don't hear about the benefits because we're not hearing about the diseases that we that we should be preventing.

I've seen most of them.

I can tell my patients, listen, this is going to happen.

If your kid has bacterial meningitis, this is going to happen if your kid has has has mumps.

So and I think that needs to be part of the conversation.

Also, I don't hear that in the modern vernacular.

I didn't hear a lot of that tonight.

I'm probably the only person who brought that up.

But it's really, really important.

>> Yeah.

Doctor flowers, a few seconds, please.

>> Absolutely.

So science is always ongoing.

We are always we are in this, in this, in this career path.

We we didn't spend all of these years studying and and and training to stop learning.

We are constant lifelong learners as, as as physicians.

All of us are.

And so there never should be an implication that because we have a policy that's in place or a recommendation based on science and evidence, that the research behind the scenes is continuing to make sure that that it continually is safe in the patients that we're treating and to be to, to to get ahead of the ball, to ahead of the curve, to to stoke fear in the communities and populace is just a wrong tactic.

And we need to bring more civility and more calm to be able to make rational decisions for patients.

>> We'll have to leave it there.

We do thank our physicians for being with us.

This is a very good discussion, and if you want to see it again, it'll be on our website at ket.org.

I'm Renee Shaw, thank you so much for watching and I will see you soon.

Take good care.

Well something fell, but you know, we can't really we can't look for it in the middle of the show.