Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Vaccines

Episode Date: July 8, 2014

Welcome to Sawbones, where Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin McElroy take you on a whimsical tour of the dumb ways in which we've tried to fix people. This week: We save your kids. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

The medicines, the medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth. Wow! Well, we're really welcome to Saul Bones bones a marital tour of misguide medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McElroy and I'm Sydney McElroy Today is the episode that the most people have requested from us But the one that we have been most hesitant to also do. Yeah, we don't really have like a funny thing to say here or a bit or anything. We're just kind of going to, you know, no goofs because this is really serious. And we didn't want to do the episode because we, when we started this show, we've explained this a couple of times, but just to ram this point home, we started the show.

We wanted to be something that everybody could enjoy, you know, could get something out of, could have some fun with and not feel not something confrontational. No, no, no, not for that in real life. Just to inform and entertain, not to like challenge your view of the world in any major way. Not that that's a bad thing. I would encourage you to regularly engage in things that do that, but that wasn't really our purpose. So, but here's the thing, kids are getting the measles, and that's ridiculous. And kids are getting whooping cough. Kids are getting whooping cough, and it's 2014.

I don't, my wife doesn't wear a Petty pet a four right? That's the thing a pet a peda four. I think a peda four is a dessert item She doesn't wear a Petty coat. Petty coat. You're going for a hoop skirt It's 2014 Kids getting whooping cough. That's ridiculous your knowledge of women's fashion is a whole other issue, but my knowledge of vaccines is unparalleled. Vaccines is what we're talking about today on today's episode.

And like I said, we have put it off as hard as we could just because I don't know. We want to be a fun show, but... Well, it's not just that. That's not the only reason that I haven't done it, because I am happy to tackle a subject that's a little more controversial. If it fits our theme well, what's hard about this topic, and we're going to talk about it anyway, is that most of what we cover is stuff that we just got so wrong. And it's funny, hopefully, because in the history of medicine, we got it so wrong. The history of vaccination is not really that kind of

story. We didn't get it so wrong. It took us a while to figure out how to get it just right, but we had a good idea all along. So I don't know. Well, take me back to the beginning, Sydney. Take me back to the very, to the opening salvo. Well, should I tell you what vaccination is just in case anybody's, I mean, I know, but maybe there's some listeners.

Oh, you do know. Oh, yeah. Do you want to, do you want to take a shot at it? Yes, a vaccine. That was not a joke. That was not a pun. A vaccine is basically a shot at it. Do you get a shot? Okay.

Like a shot, like a, you know, like a vaccine, a shot. Shot, okay. That was my joke that I told. Here's a vaccine. It's a pun. It's a pun. Vaccines are basically the cliff notes version of disease. You know how you get assigned Dante's in Ferno in high school and then you decide.

And you read it and you realize like gosh I'm so glad my teachers give me books to read that I wouldn't have tried otherwise. No, no, no, no, you don't do that. You get the cliff note. Maybe you get, let me give you a better example one from real life, the deer slayer. Maybe your teacher assigns you the deer slayer. So instead of reading the deer slayer, you get the cliff notes of the deer slayer. So the one that teachers asked, dids you the deer slayer. So instead of re-in the deer slayer, you get the cliff notes of the deer slayer. So the one that teacher asked, did you read

the deer slayer? Then you say, oh yeah, totally, totally, totally. But really, you just read the cliff notes. Vaccines are like that for viruses. Your body says, did we get chicken pox? And your body says, oh yeah, yeah, totally, totally, totally, totally. We totally had chicken pox. Remember? Do you remember, and your body, your white blood cells, remember something sort of like how to chip chickenpox? That was the vaccine, the cliff notes version of that of that disease, and so you don't get it again. That's actually a pretty good analogy for it. Explosion noise. And similarly to cliff notes, just like at the end you may have avoided I guess my example would be Reading the House of the Seven Gables

Thank God, please don't ever make anyone read that But instead of that you've avoided a terrible possibly deadly disease, right, which is maybe better Yes, yes, and then having to reach then having to read Nathaniel Hawthorne They're about yeah, it's about even Steven there. So that's a good description of it, Justin. I will say just one quick amendment. You said virus bacteria included and toxoid, just to kind of round it out. There are lots of different ways to make vaccines.

But yeah, so once you get, you probably notice this. Once you got chicken pox, you weren't going to get it again for the most part, except for rare cases. Right. Once you got mono, you know, the kissing disease, you only get it once, and then you shouldn't get it again. And that was something that we recognized a really long time ago. Like the ancient Greeks wrote about how people tended

to only get smallpox once, and if they survived it, they were never gonna get it again. So they knew something happened in your body that changed after you got. And I'm gonna use smallpox a lot, because when we talk about the history of vaccines, we have to talk about the history of smallpox. The two are intrinsically linked for a long time. But they notice, you know, that well, something happens in your

body. We don't really know what it is and we don't know what to do with that knowledge yet. But we definitely know that if we could get people to get smallpox and survive it, they'd be safe forever. What we do with that, we're clueless. Right. So just to, just to real quick, give you a little bit about smallpox because I'm going to talk a lot about smallpox now. I'm ready. And smallpox thankfully is something that we're not seeing a resurgence of. Yay.

Because as far as we know it only exists now in two labs in the world as far as we know. That's something at least. It's a pox virus. You know, I'm not isolated for small know. That's something at least. It's apox virus. Am I notculated for a smallpox? No, we were not. Standard vaccination against smallpox had ended by the time we were born. But that was because it was eradicated. Okay, let's hope we stick with that.

So it's been around since 10,000 BC. We have evidence that Ramses the fifth died of smallpox. We found his postural covered mummy corpse. I don't know how you figure that out, that's pretty cool. There's two strains, a minor and a major, and the important thing is that the major strain, a very old major, carries a 30% fatality rate, which is a lot. And that is reflected in the fact that towards the end of the 18th century, every year it killed about 400,000 people in Europe. During that time period, a third of all blindness was because of smallpox.

It was responsible for taking out five sitting monarchs during that time period. And it's worse in kids, 80% of kids who get it die, the major strain. All in all, in the 20th century, between 300 and 500 million people died of smallpox. Oh my gosh. Which I know that sounds like I'm just laying a bunch of bummers statistics on you,

but you need to understand that our fight to stop smallpox was a big deal. Yeah, right. The stakes were very high. The stakes were very high and the success we had was therefore, you know, a major one. So I mentioned that the Greeks figured out that once you got smallpox, you didn't get it again. The first indication that somebody kind of thought maybe we could do something with that is from ancient China. There's this one story that's referenced

from the 10th century that the emperor lost his son to smallpox and he basically got together a big like council of doctors and wise men and magicians, but I don't know, whoever, people who do card tricks. Right, the whole gamut. People with the sawing ladies in half, the hoops probably not them. No. I don't think they were involved. And they all tried to come up with ways to stop people from dying of smallpox. Now the story goes that at some point during the meeting, there was a really smart guy who came down from the top of a mountain and gave them all the idea of inoculation.

Here's the problem with this story. It wasn't recorded until like centuries later. So it's probably not true. But we're still going to credit the Chinese with the discovery of a nocculation. Somebody over there came up with it. Why would they take credit for it? Why they wanna give it to an old tablet man?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why there's this whole convoluted story of maybe counts the magicians. Maybe he wasn't like 100% sure it's gonna work. You know I heard that like maybe like 100 hundred maybe like 300 years ago, there's like an old tablet guy and went up and got tablets. I had that on him, so that's kind of maybe you should try that.

You made up the tablet thing. For all we know, he wrote it on a piece paper and like made a paper airplane and flew it into the middle of the ocean. I'm just guessing my biblical stories, I think. But yes, okay. So somebody. Somebody in China. Top of a mountain and came back with small box. And no, no, okay. Came back with the idea. And it's first actually described in like 1643. How long before somebody knew this was a good idea? I don't know, but it was

first described then. So the first actual description is of a noculation or variation, which are words that are slightly different. As you may notice. You have a no variolation. So that comes from, I mentioned, variol and major, variol and minor when we're talking about smallpox. That's where that term comes from, variolation. It comes from, specifically, giving somebody a, you know,

part of a smallpox lesion a scab some pus And like putting it in their body somehow On a cracker something sneaking into them. Well, there were different ways on a baloney sandwich You make without their knowledge some of them were more unpleasant than a baloney sandwich if you can imagine that It seems unlikely. I really don't like baloney that much You can also use an occupation to refer to this, but variation is what they call it at the time.

Because they thought, OK, so some people get really bad smallpox, and they can die very little major. Some people get kind of bad smallpox, and they don't die for the most part. For the most part. So what if we take people who get a really mild infection? We peel off some of their scabs and crush them up. Signing suspiciously like a garbage pale kids car too far, but go on.

We put them on some cotton and we stick it up the nose of a person who isn't sick and let them breathe it in. Who is the guy who says yes? Who is the guy, the old guy in history who's like, yeah, get it in there. Just stick that right up my nose. I managed to somehow avoid smallpox. Now in the 1600s, I think what I, has anybody invented Q-tips? So you could just jam it right up in there?

I'm down, I'm down for it, let's go. Oh, I just remembered I'm probably a slave, probably. Almost certainly, right? Almost certainly. Somebody who had no other power, no other choice. I can't imagine you had willing volunteers for this. You never know, because one theme that will kind of hit on a few times is moms who had some position of

prestige or power who say, I am tired of watching my kids die of smallpox. I will do anything to protect my kids who are still alive from getting it, which is kind of cool. And so that's where you see some of the advances in, in vaccination as we move forward. Our moms who just say, get fine, try it. Let's do it. Let's do it. If it'll save my child from going the way of my other three children, I'll let it happen. Which is kind of cool. Hey, moms. Hey, moms that are at home and are going to get vaccines for your kids because you read something on the internet. Other moms gave themselves smallpox because they were so desperate for a cure for it. gave them self-small pox because they were so desperate for a cure for it. That's love. That's devotion. That's not acting out of fear.

Every time that you deny your kids have vaccine, you are invalidating one of the most beautiful sacrifices I have ever heard of in my entire life. I'm probably going to try to keep these outbursts to a minimum, but I'm begging you, please use your noggin. Well, now let me be clear. The moms were doing it to themselves, but they were also doing it to their kids. Fine.

Oh, that's not great. I just want to make sure you know. I'll let you pay her. I agree. I agree. Please, mom. It was anything to save my kid was basically it. I'm watching all of my children and everybody else's children dive smallpox. What can I do to stop it?

Okay, I'm sorry, so They called it implanting the sprouts Like Johnny crappy Johnny I can't like that. Oh the law has been good to me fat. Oh, the Lord's been good to me. So I'll take these calves. I'm going to give your scabs to him and her and him and her and him. Here guys take these calves. And people did get sick, you know, through this process. But the idea was that if

they got, and they may get very mildly ill, or they may actually get very ill and minor. The minor form of smallpox, but a very small percentage of those people actually died. And then you were still protected against either form of smallpox. So in the long run, it was worth it, was the thought. Later there was a method where you would take the scabs off somebody. Again, we're only talking about people who had minor infections. You would wrap them in cotton,

you'd put them in a bottle, and then carry it around with you until for a while. And it had something to do with its yang potency. I got a locket. And well, I mean, no, I mean, just in your pocket, or whatever. Film cans, there, probably be outta Andy.

And now, Altoids Box. Hahaha. And once it was all dried, you could, again, instead of just putting it on cotton and sticking it up your nose, you could also blow it up the nose of the person you were notculating. So like shotgun that dried scab material right up your nose. Man, you've got a really, really not one small box.

And this was tried throughout different cultures in different ways. So like I said, initially the idea was let's take these dried scabs and let's, you know, basically stick them up your nose. In Turkey, it was described that you would take a puschtual from the arm of an infected child. So like, just cut off one of the... And I don't know if I made this clear, although most people probably already know this. Smallpox causes a pretty distinctive rash. If you look up some pictures, it's wildly impressive,

a terrible rash that you can get. But it starts out like as a flat red spot, and then it becomes a bump, and eventually becomes a pusher, which is when it looks all white and pus-filled. It's not filled with pus, it's just dead tissue. So don't worry. But anyway, you can make- My retroactively upset about a disease that I can't possibly get now.

Yes. Thank you for that. Cool show. Cool podcast. You take one of these puzzles. Are you sure you don't want to go listen to radio lab or something? What are you doing here? I've got to tell you what you do with the puzzle. Yeah, go on, please. So you take the puzzle, you cut the arm of a healthy child and you stick it in there. You know. Oh. So this was another month. You know, 99% of visible is good.

That's another, it's short too. You can listen, it's about architecture. Did they teach you about pushtrels? You almost never, almost never will throw up in your mouth while listening to 99% of this one. It's a guarantee. The progression, I'll never forget this, of the smallpox rash is macule to papule to vesicle to pushtule.

I remember I memorized that in med school and I'll never forget it. That sounds like a bad public service rap. Macule to papule to vesicle to pushtule. You know what though, that's completely, like I don't know why I need to know that. I mean, hopefully knock on wood, never gonna see smallpox.

Yeah, I like, let's like, wicket hope not, because over the past like 15 minutes, I've been staving off a pretty wicked panic attack about the possibility of like, people reintroducing smallpox into society. They'll get to that. To that feeling. Nobody's doing it.

One-nirf-all, fantastic. So this, this, this, this, this, this, I guess it, is this better than blowing it up your nose? I don't think so. This was practiced. Similar methods were practiced in India, Ethiopia, West Africa. Um, there were many different places where this, this concept of varialation at this point, we're not, this is not vaccination yet.

This is varialation. It's different. Because we're actually taking disease material from a sick person and sticking it in the body of a healthy person, which is slightly different than what we're going to talk about later. Okay. So for spreading the practice of variation to the Western world, we really have to credit, um, lady Mary Wartley Montague. credit um lady Mary Wartley Montague. Lady what? Mary. Lady Mary Wartley Montague. Montague pleasure, charm. I'm sure she was the wife of the ambassador to Turkey and she was also referred

to as a famous letter writer. Okay, you were tripped out when you read that earlier. Did you find out what a letter writer did? I don't know that it's an official thing. I'm guessing that there's just a lot of letters we found that she wrote. I was trying to figure out if that was like a term for an old fashioned transcriptionist. That's like the closest they had to, like,

at its horals back then, right? Like you've seen a lots of published letters. I mean, I guess. Mark Twain, I feel like wrote a bunch to people. Is he referred to as a famous letter writer? No, because he did like the books and stuff. If anybody knows. If you're a famous letter writer, write this a letter.

Is that like a, was that a term that was used? Sobbing to maximumfund.org. We can't be experts in everything, people. I don't know. I found a movie that was called The Letter Writer, but it was about like, a little girl and letters. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Anyway, she saw these practices in Turkey. Okay. And then she brought them back with her and said, you know, to the UK and said, I want to try this on my children because, again, everybody's getting sick and dying of smallpox and she actually almost died herself of smallpox. And so she said, we've got to do something.

We've got to save our kids. And it was really hard for her to get a doctor to do it because a lot of, there was a lot of pressure at the time. You know, a lot of political pressure, a lot of the doctors wouldn't do it. They weren't familiar with it. It sounded gross. Fair.

But she convinced somebody to do it. And that was really important because when a woman of stature started having the practice done to hurt children and then they didn't get smallpox, everybody else started jumping on board. Now of course they tried it out first on some prisoners by saying we won't hang you if you let us do this because either you go free or you die of smallpox and they all went free. So I mean, it paid off, you know. It's like a tribe by combat. It's like a gross version of the tribe by combat.

Not something that we would approve today, like not a trial that would get IRB approval now. We do have a problem with the prison of a population, but I see what you're saying now, I'd be a little bit such a touch on that. I don't think that's the solution. I personally.

I personally. Maybe mandatory minimums or other problems. But that's another show. That's another show. Not a show. Not a show. Not a solvans show. I'm sure that's a great show too,

as long as you're expanding your horizons today. Yeah, right. Anyway, so this practice began to get popular. It spread throughout the Western world somewhat. It was tried in the US in Boston. It became somewhat popular. But again, there was a lot of controversy about it because it seems gross. It does. Can I scrape your scab and then scrape? It does seem gross. And that's where you have to have sympathy for people who are a little bit like,

squidgy about it, right? Like, because it does seem kind of gross. I mean, the whole idea is kind of weird. It seems kind of gross. This is actually what I think is so interesting about vaccines. When you talk at the initial, at the beginning of the show about how this is an idea that we got really wrong, you know, we got it right from the beginning and we refined it.

I think it's because the initial idea is so weird. Right. The initial idea is so counterintuitive. I'm gonna put some kind of disease causing agent into my body. Right. It really does go against logic. We're so many of the treatments we've seen are things that sort of make sense in a weird sort of way. A lot of the stuff, especially with temperature and that kind of thing, put some heat on it, put some cold on it, whatever. Like they make sense in a sort of beleaguered logical way.

This is so weird that just like, we got it right just from the weird, having that one weird idea was really the victory for. Well, and that's really it, because we didn't understand. I mean, now we know that this has to do with your body, making an antibodies to things, you know, when it meets some sort of invader

and so, and then it remembers it. So when you meet that invader again, you may, you, you know, those antibodies come out to defend you and we understand all that now. It's like the first time mac and me lands on earth, you're not scared of mac and me, like in the hip-filming mac and me. But like, maybe we're a little terrified

and then other mac and me's show up later. It's like not as scary. It's like if other ET's had come down after the first ET, we kind of be like, yeah, all right, we're kind of into it. I don't know if this is working as well as your Cliff Notes example. Let's take with the Cliff Notes. Let's pretend I didn't bring this up. Okay. I mean, it was a good try. I see where you're going. In the Cliff Notes of this podcast, this example, I've included.

So we would have continued probably on this road. Thanks for nothing, Brandy. If it were not for Edward Jenner, who was most liked to describe him as a country doctor in Berkeley, in the UK, in England. And he noticed, and he was very observant, he was very into the scientific method, and he noticed that a lot of people in his little country town told him that, hey, I'm not going to get smallpox, I don't have to worry about that, which was the big worry for everybody at the time,

because I got cowpox, and once you got cowpox, you can to get smallpox. I don't have to worry about that, which was the big worry for everybody at the time, because I got cowpox. And once you got cowpox, you can't get smallpox. Now cowpox is a pox virus that cows get. And that humans can get. There's a lot of, there's monkey pox, there's a lot of different poxes. So the most common people to get cowpox were milk maids. They would get it from milking cows. Go figure. And they would get some sores, some pox-like sores similar, but

you didn't get nearly as ill, obviously, as you did from smallpox. And they claimed that they weren't going to get smallpox afterwards. Pox-like. Yes. So he was intrigued. He was familiar with the idea of variation because everybody was. And this seemed to kind of fit into that theory. And I should note, this same idea about cowpox

was being tossed around in other countries at the same time. So just so I'm clear, cowpox was in the same, I mean, I'm not using the correct terminology here, but the same family. It's related to the, related, yeah, close in the, in the pox virus. Okay, compendium. But I can eat you with three eyes. Basically, we're back to the ETA. You really want ETA to work here, don't you? I couldn't think of a good good good clipsness version of it.

So, house of six tables. If you had the clipsness around six tables, it's like that. I hated that book. I know, that's really good book. So, he thought, okay, what can I do with this information? What, how can I help people? So, he took a milk made, Sarah Nelms, I believe was her name. And she had cowpox at the time.

And he took some material, some pus material from one of her cowpox sores. And he kind of put it in the arm of an eight year old boy. Cut his arm and kind of stuck it in there. of an eight year old boy. Cut his arm and kind of stuck it in there. The offered in some candy. It's not recorded if he paid him. He was a very poor, I initially thought he was, I had thought wrongly that he was an orphan, he wasn't. He was from a very poor family.

So my guess would be that there was some sort of exchange of money, I don't know though. But he asked James Fipps, this boy's father, can I inoculate him with cowpox? And for whatever reason, he said yes. And so he put some of the pus in his arm. He did get sick, but again, with a very minor form of cowpox, as opposed to smallpox. After he got better about six weeks later, he went ahead and gave him smallpox.

He varialated him with smallpox. What happened? He didn't get sick. Nice. So he tried it. I found it reference sometimes that he tried it three or four more times. Nice. So he tried it. I found it reference sometimes that he tried it through or four more times. Other places that he tried it. Giving him every kind of give that little kid every kind of box. He could find 20 more times. Just 20. He gave that little kid like

every kind of box. No, no. Somewhere between three and 20 times. He injected him with smallpox. And the point is that he didn't ever get won't you get some all-box James Phyps he said I don't think there's another injection of oh I think we're all super clear that this is work I'm you know I'm convinced honestly I've had a shot to swap but you don't you really I'm cool. I feel like that on 20. I

Think that's enough. I think I think I think at this point this boy If he was going to get small bucks he probably would but that's just the little boy in a trench coat standing on one of his French shoulders pertained to be another doctor. I Wouldn't go giving him anymore small punctures. Maybe he needs some candy for what he's been through. Perhaps you should go to the store to get him some candy. Peppermint stick seems in order. A lot of calico perhaps.

A lot of calico? That's the only other old-timey thing I know. They had general sorts. Sassafras candies. That'd be good. He wore a hat. Okay, so obviously this was unethical and would not be done today. But it was important that it happened then.

This is the great double standard of offense. We're glad that it happened back then, but we understand that we can't do it again. No, don't do this. Don't try that at home. Don't inject any children with smallpox. So even though this clearly was unethical, he proceeded to try it on many other probably more poor people and their kids in the area of people who would allow it to happen again. I don't know if he gave him money, I would guess yes. Let's say yes.

Let's say yes. He did. I know that later on in life, he gave Fips and his family a free lease on a house because Jenner got really famous from this whole deal. Something. That's something. I mean, he tried to give him a smallpox, so.

Yeah. What do you do? But he published this work in 1798. So he wasn't the first one to think of this, but he was the first one to publish it. And that is when we started doing vaccination instead of variation, or you can still say inoculation, if you want, but vaccination.

Okay. And that's the most proper terminology now. Vaccination or immunization is probably even better because vaccination comes from VACA for cow. Oh, cowpox. Oh, okay. So initially, vaccination only referred to, you know, giving somebody cowpox, but nowadays.

So even though it's not linguistically the most accurate, it is clinically what is used. Yeah, it's been accepted. Really, the best term you could use if you want to be most exact same immunization. Okay. And that would refer to any of them. All right.

So some drawbacks and there was, there were still some people that were a little nervous about this because you're still transferring material from one person to another. So if that person has other diseases, you could give them that disease as well. So for instance, there were a handful of times where syphilis was passed from one person to another.

You can imagine that this really upsets some people, especially if you were vaccinating a child. This rarely happened, but it was much, much, complained about a book was written about it, even though it was a very rare complication. Plus, all the variation people were pretty pissed off, because they're still doing this and they're making a lot of money doing it. And now all the sudden, there's this better method. So they started arguing that, well, it uses animal material initially, and that's gross.

better method so they started arguing that well it uses animal material initially and that's gross. So don't do that. Of course none of that was really relevant. Because vaccination was a better idea. And so it spread all over Europe and to the US, you know how Spain actually sent it to the Americas to its colonies in the Caribbean by sending a ship with five orphans who all had been inoculated or I'm sorry who had been vaccinated on their arm with cowpox so that they would all have you know scabs they would all and they would keep it fresh all the way across the ocean. And so they would have some material to draw from when they got to the colonies. And that was the original idea for Power Rangers. That is how they got started. It was like, I just think that's terrible, obviously. They were vaccinated. They were now safe from smallpox and they did bring the vaccine.

Of course, that hadn't stopped us from shredding it to all the Native Americans, the Native people in the Caribbean, but terrible, sure, but heroic, heroic kids. Later on, just for completeness, we later replaced cowpox with another virus called vaccinia, which you can probably guess why I was name that, but that really doesn't matter. And we don't need to get into why. Okay. The point is that the vaccination program at this point began spreading all over the world,

and it was greatly decreasing the incidence of smallpox, which was a big deal, because as I mentioned, lots of people were dying of smallpox. A lot. This works so fast, but by the late 1800s, we were seeing the end of smallpox in the US. In the 1900s, it started disappearing

from different countries in Europe, one by one. And then finally, in the 1950s, we're all the way up to now. The World Health Organization said, you know what, if we worked at this, we could probably get rid of smallpox. Let's do it. As a world, let's get rid of smallpox. We've earned it.

And so, because at that point, two million people were still dying every year of smallpox. And so we did. We got rid of, which I just can't imagine the whole world working together. To get rid of this one thing. Yeah. In 1977, the last naturally occurring case of smallpox occurred.

It was in Somalia. Since then, we've had no. And boy, that dude had an awkward life. You know, last, last, I mean, you do what you think is best. It's completely empty, but you are the last person that went small box. Whatever you think though. They did survive. Now, this was the, like I said, this was the last naturally occurring case.

At this point, we had eradicated it through vaccination. We don't have a treatment or a cure here. This is purely through vaccination. We've eradicated smallpox, but a lot of people still have samples of it, right? And so in 1978, there was a medical photographer who accidentally infected themselves and actually died from smallpox. So as a result of that picture of smallpox. I don't know, he's trying to take a picture of the virus I guess. I didn't get that far into it. But at that point, it was decided that we should destroy all stores of the virus,

except for one was kept in the US, at the CDC, and then one was kept at what was then the USSR, at Vector, their laboratory. Of course, now it's in Russia. And then there's still a lot of controversy and, you know, suspicion that it gets spread to other countries when the Soviet Union dissolved, do other people have it. That's why briefly some of our military personnel started becoming immunized against it again after 2001. So I believe that's still going on actually with some of our military personnel. But for the most part, none of us have been vaccinated now.

So we are a naive population. But that is because we eradicated smallpox through vaccines. And from then, you know, from the smallpox vaccine, we just went crazy. Vaccines for rabies, polio, D-TAP, MMR, you know, all different kinds of vaccines. As I mentioned, APV is crazy because that's like been in our lifetime. Yeah, the Gardasil, the human papilloma virus vaccines. Wow. The first vaccine to prevent cancer. So that's pretty cool. I feel like that sort of thing.

As vaccines have become more prevalent throughout the common era, many people have been objected. Somewhere on religious grounds, the basis being that God punishes us with disease and so it is sinful to prevent it. God also blesses us with free will and the mind is to come up with vaccines, so make it that would do well. From the widespread use of vaccines, they began to, many of us are familiar with, become laws enforcing vaccination.

And as you know, a lot of, you don't have to get vaccinated, but your children may not be able to attend public school, depending on where you are, if they don't get vaccinated. And this was challenged all the way back with the smallpox vaccine in Massachusetts, way back in the 1800s, and it was upheld by the courts that you can force people to get vaccinated all you want because of herd immunity. We rely on, and what that just means is,

we rely on everybody getting vaccinated to protect us. Herd immunity is interesting because it's an argument that it's an idea that both sides use to support their own cause, right? I don't need to get my kid vaccinated because of herd immunity. Right, because everybody else's kids are vaccinated.

But the fact is how many people can keep saying they don't want to get vaccinated until we lose herd immunity. And that number's different for every disease and every immunization. And obviously, we've exceeded that in places like California where we had a measles outbreak. Cool job, California.

You don't really. They're not the only state. There are other places where this is happening. Gimme names. I wanna put every state on blast. New York is having this problem there. New York. And there are lots of other places where people

feel like they're civil liberties are being violated if they're being forced to be vaccinated. And there's also a lot of bad science. And that's the basis of a lot of people's arguments. And then this started back in 1982. There was a movie called DPPT Vaccine Ruleette, which was about the diphtheria protrusis tetanus vaccine. And it was based on some horror stories of vaccine side effects that were largely untrue and totally blown out of proportion. And it terrified a lot of parents about this vaccine based on total misinformation. Similarly, and I think most of us are familiar with Andrew Wakefield, who is the former surgeon

in Britain, who published two papers, one in 98, one in 2002, that linked the measles mumps for Bella vaccine with autism. Man, that guy is lucky we do a curse free show. It was, again, we talk about bad science. It was a bad study. The results were falsified and misreported and it's totally been refuted. And there are, I can't tell you how many thousands and thousands of children have been in, you know, other studies that have proven this is not true

This link is not true So period Individed sentence Get vaccinated. It's not that if you were coming here thinking this would be a balanced show There is no balance there aren't two sides What's that thing? What's that thing in journalism? Just and you know about that when there's not really two sides to a story? Uh, that's some of the newsroom invented, but I think it's, I think it's valid here. There aren't two sides to this. There is not a secret being covered up. It's not, uh, it's just people making up dumb things because they want to create fear in you.

Please just get your kids vaccinated. Send this episode to your disbelieving fans. Let them hear the incredible struggles. We had to go through to get to this point before they call us, we make a decision about what they're going to do for their child's future based on something they read on the internet. And your child's future and my child's future and everybody else's child's future. Because some people can't get vaccinated for a variety of health reasons and they depend on those of us who can

to protect them from all of these totally preventable diseases. It's insane that we have people dying of measles in 2014 in this country when, again, it's totally preventable. One of the biggest reasons this is a problem is that people are too comfortable now. And I think that's why it's important to know this kind of history and to remember this, that the only reason, you know, and I think measles in Woothingcough demonstrate this, that people aren't still children, aren't still dying of these diseases and droves is the invention of vaccines. I mean, that is why it's not because they're eradicated.

Yes, we eradicated smallpox go us. We didn't eradicate polio. We didn't eradicate measles. We didn't eradicate, you know, all of these other things that we have vaccines for. And the other thing people like to say is that we're trying to make money off of vaccines. That that's why I want to vaccinate your children is because I make all this money off of it.

Well, first of all, I was a physician. That's ludicrous. But secondly, vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, actually, that's not a very lucrative business for them. They can make a lot more money on a lot of other drugs. And that was part of why we had a shortage of flu vaccine back in 2004, is because it's so cumbersome to go through the process of making the flu vaccine with all the regulations that a lot of companies just didn't want to do it.

So it's not that lucrative for us. The reason to get vaccinated is not so somebody makes money. It's because it's going to save your child and everybody else's child lives. If people think things are a good idea and they aren't making someone rich, those are the goodest good ideas we have. Those are the ones you can take the most hard in being accurate. If you have questions, of course, like we always say, ask your doctor. There's all kinds of information that the CDC regulates that we have to put out, that we have to give you about vaccines.

So ask your doctor. There's a ton of misinformation on the internet. There's a lot of crap out there that will scare you. So ask somebody who knows, because the medical community is united in this position. It's not up for the very please, please, please, please. There are so few clear wins in life. This is one of them. Just get your kids vaccinated. Yeah, and if you're concerned that your child does fall into that group that can't get vaccinated,

just ask your doctor. Your doctor will tell you and then there are maybe certain children and certain vaccines they can't get. But again, as long as you have an open dialogue with your physician, this won't be a problem. I don't ask the internet. And I know what you think. Is the government putting a microchip in there to control my kid? Maybe. Maybe one or two. I don't know. It's hard to say for sure, but I think it's worth it. And the answer is no. The answer is no. Is it? Hmm. I don't know. That's one to think about. No, we'll go back to talking about, I don't know, drinking cholera diurea and eating mummies next week, but... This is a really important episode for us. And you know what, honestly, even if everybody on the list

of this episode does not have their minds changed or does not pass this along to somebody they know who's hesitant, at least I can sleep with the clear conscience knowing that we did our small part. And again, if you don't believe us, which we tell you not to believe us or listen to anything we say in our disclaimer, so that's fair. Ask your doctor, go to the CDC website, CDC.gov, and they can tell you about all these vaccines

and exactly what they're thinking and why they do what they do. So trust science every time. Yep, science won't lead you straight. Except for just when we could clear the thousands of years before now, as we pointed out, many, many times. How is show is actually all about that. But no, like now they're cool. I'm gonna just remember the story of Smallpox. Tell it to your children, it's a great bedtime story.

Oh, one thing Madison got right. Anyway, that's gonna do it for us here on Solbund. We hope you've had a fun, even though this was kind of a serious episode. Thank you so much to Maximum Fun for having us on their network. They've got a lot of great shows there at MaximumFun.org, including Jordan Jesy Go, Judge John Hodgerman, Wambam Pasta, podcasting yourself, Bullseye, one bad mother, Lady of the Lady, Ono Ross, and Carrie, the goose down.

My brother, my brother. Thank you to your so many others. So go over there and check those out. You can email us. Sobones at maximumfund.org. We've got t-shirts maxfundstore.com. You can tweet at us at sobones just like so many of your closest friends have done including July to reskector or sorry to reshector Miss Ada Marnie Laura Gide Ashley Freygaerke Hannah Eli diesel Von trop Michael crits Lauren Daniel Lorraine Ariel Michelle Greg layered Joshua Lucas Doug Pike or, Herbert, so many others.

Thank you so much. That's at Sobones. If you want to tweet at us or tweet about us, you can also, if you want to spend a link to the show, it's soboneshow.com is the one that will lead you to our web page, MaximumFun.org. Thank you, the taxpayers, for letting us use their song medicines on our program for entering outro.

And I think that's gonna do it. It's good, go listen to those Maximum Fun shows and make sure to join us again next Tuesday for another episode of Saul Bones. Until then, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. Always don't Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listen or Supported