Vaccines And Immunity 1 And 2 - KMUD, 2014

Download link for the audio files:
- part 1: https://www.toxinless.com/kmud-140620-vaccination.mp3
- part 2: https://www.toxinless.com/kmud-140718-vaccination-2.mp3

Some passages in the transcript have been modified for better comprehension, without hopefully altering the meaning.

The raw, unedited transcript can be found here: Politics & Science: William Blake And Art's Relationship To Science

 

Raymond Peat, Ph.D.

Vaccines & Immunity 1 & 2

KMUD, 2014​

(transcribed by L-I-G-H-T – verified by Giraffe and Burtlancast)

HD - Andrew Murray
RP - Ray Peat
SE - Sound Enginneer

PART 1​

HD: This month's subject has come around fairly fortuitously in terms of the recent press on the whooping cough outbreak. I don’t know if we call it an epidemic, but the whooping cough outbreaks have been occurring in California and in different states across the US in clusters. So I wanted to do the show on vaccinations. I know there's many different opinions out there about vaccinations, how useful they are, how harmful they could potentially be. I know the autism and the MMR vaccination debate is still raging on. So this evening, as in all of our shows for the past few years now, we're pleased to have Dr. Raymond Peat with us. [...]

Vaccines have been indemnified by the government, so that the producers cannot be prosecuted; when people get damaged by vaccines, and this definitely happened, the company that manufactured the vaccine can’t be taken to court. I find that very, very strange that laws would be put into effect to protect vaccine manufacturers because, inherently, they know that these things are unsafe. And the United States' legal standard applied to vaccines defines them as “unavoidably unsafe products”, that are “quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use”. So, in other words, the reason why vaccines are unsafe or, harmful is because they are made up of chemicals and other elements that are poisonous to the body. And the vaccine industry has been indemnified by governments, meaning there can be no liability directed at pharmaceutical industries producing vaccines for vaccination-damaged individuals. The first rule in healing is “do no harm”. It's a very strange concept that's allowed for vaccine companies to be actually protected by law. I was looking at an interview with a doctor who was basically looking at polio and saying that polio in itself is 95% to 98% -- for want of a better word – asymptomatic. So it’s a fact that 98% (or up to 98%) of a population can contract polio, without having any outlying symptoms of any disease. It’s only the 1% that actually can get sequelae of the poliovirus. And out of those 1%, only a few of those people actually get the paralysis that's associated with polio and which had been so widely portrayed on the news. [...] Hi, Dr. Peat, are you there?

RP: Hi.

HD: I've basically given people the outline of what we’re going to talk about tonight, but as always I think it's a good idea to give people the opportunity to hear your scientific background, your professional background and then we'll get into the show.

RP: Okay. Although I concentrated on physiology, reproductive aging and biochemistry during my four years at the University of Oregon, it happened that in a seminar of developmental biology that I took – I think it was in the fall of 1969 – the professor was sponsoring an international conference on immunology. And so I got to hear the latest big shot research into explaining the clonal selection theory of adaptive immunity; and they would give their presentation and then disappear [chuckles]. And in the in-between, younger professors would give their current research. And the most memorable thing about the conference, for me, was a professor describing his in vitro experiments with white blood cells that had been clonally deleted, but when the concentration was proper, they could reconstitute themselves in the original, as if each one had knowledge of what the whole organism was. And that really was contradictory to all of the mechanistic assumptions of the current clonal selection theory. But it happens that it corresponds very closely to what 30 years later is being seen as a feature of the epigenetic expression of genetic information throughout the body in which, for example, skin cells from different parts of the body are different from skin cells in a different part of the body. Each cell knows where it belongs in terms of the whole organism. As if each part is sort of a microcosm. And that researcher, in 1969, showed evidence that the immune system works that way, that each cell is kind a microcosm. And as the clonal selection theory was developing, it really was trying to justify the vaccination practice and theory. The practice of vaccination was entirely empirical. People didn't know anything about what was going on, didn't even know there were cells at the time they were practicing vaccination [chuckles]. And so, that was just a trial and error thing. No theory at all. And early in this century, Paul Ehrlich developed the approach to immunity that led to the clonal selection theory, which is currently pretty much the dominant theory accepted. It has been modified recently, last four or five years, by recognition that the innate immune system (what we share with primitive animals and plants) really is involved in the adaptive immune system. But from Paul Ehrlich’s view and mainline immunology, the adaptive system was the only part that was of interest.

And in 1969, I talked to some of my professors about the innate immunity, which – in the year that Paul Ehrlich got his Nobel prize, Élie Metchnikoff also shared the Nobel prize; but Metchnikoff presented information about the innate immune system.

HD: Okay.

RP: And that was really pretty much ignored until just the last four to five years. But that's where, I think, the really interesting stuff happens. And in 1969, when I talked to my professors, they were completely uninterested in the innate immune system. But I had been reading William F. Koch, who early in the century, almost simultaneously with Elie Metchnikoff’s work, developed evidence that oxidative cell metabolism is responsible for innate resistance and immunity. And it was, in effect, the biochemical explanation for the innate immunity that Elie Metchnikoff had showed as a developmental process. Metchnikoff was an embryologist and he saw immunity as a process of maintaining the integrity of the organism, but in a developmental, almost embryological manner. And Koch's work, at the same time, was showing that it was the energy of cells, the oxidative metabolism, that made this innate immunity work. And people ignored or disparaged W. F. Koch because an essential part of his theory of oxidative metabolism was based on free radical reactions that would breakdown allergens, viruses and toxins using free radical chemistry. But biologists didn't know that there was such a thing as free radical chemistry until 1950s. Albert Szent-Györgyi was the only biologist who took W. F. Koch seriously. And he didn't really concentrate on immunity.

Only now it’s just barely coming into scientific awareness that the innate immune system and metabolic processes do have something to do with why some people don't get disease and other disease do.

HD: Right. Because even currently, there are groups of unvaccinated people, having their own innate defense, that don't come down with a disease when there is a raging epidemic going on.

RP: People writing about the economics of immunity often refer to vaccination as the “economically viable method”; they acknowledge that sanitation and nutrition prevent disease, but they say it's cheaper to vaccinate [chuckles]. And the World Health Organization around 1970, I think, did an experiment in Central America in which they had a medical team with vaccinations and all of the [usual] regular medicine [providing] help to one village; another village, they didn't do anything to; the third village, they didn't provide any vaccination or medical help, but they provided clean water and a nutrition supplement to pregnant women and [to] the young children. And doing that, for several years, they came back [to assess]; and the health was best in the nutrition and clean water village; [it was] better than the controlled village. The health in the medicalized and vaccinated village was worse.

So, scientifically, that pretty much says that even though it might not be economically viable to clean up the environment, it definitely is better than vaccination as a way to improve the health.

HD: Especially, with all the attendant risks. I stated at the beginning of the show that the thing I find staggering about the ethics, if you like, of the industry that produces vaccinations is that they are completely outside of the law, so far as litigation for any damage is caused. I find that incredible.

RP: And there is very little talk about the actual damage. But when you look in the literature, even in medical literature which is heavily biased against saying anything bad about vaccines, you see a tremendous amount of evidence showing that people who are vaccinated have a lot of very serious health problems. Everything from baldness, sterility and ovarian failure, psoriasis, autoimmune skin diseases. And those are things that show up pretty visibly and [are] easily diagnosed. But long-range studies suggest that there will be a similar significant increase among vaccinated people of the really serious degenerative diseases that contain an autoimmune factor, such as dementia, cancer and heart disease. But even the mild problems aren't mentioned when people are talking about the safety of vaccines.

HD: Going back to Egyptian times, we know the Egyptians definitely got things like leprosy, enteric diseases, cardiovascular disease; and they may have found a few cases even of one or two cancers out of hundreds of mummies that were put through CAT scans, and other various investigative procedures. [But] they say that they found no evidence of breast cancer, amongst any of the females, which I found quite interesting . And in terms of a society, I wonder if you have any thoughts about the strength of their immunity, and how that's changed throughout middle ages until now.

RP: Well, current experiments show that simply diet and sanitation, good light exposure, and avoidance of pollution and toxins will make a tremendous difference. And I assume that in a preindustrial society, there was a lot less heavy metal exposure; I don’t think Egypt was big on iron industry and refining and such [chuckles]. I think the seed oils have been, I think, a major contribution to bad health, along with heavy metals. And those two things interact, destroying our innate immune system. Types of experiments that prevent animals from getting the usual polyunsaturated fats show that they are extremely resistant to all kinds of injury, including infections. And one of the most interesting things relative to the classical instruction theory of adaptive immunity is that organs, for example kidneys, can be transplanted from an animal that has been deprived of polyunsaturated fats into another animal, as if they were genetically related. The antigenicity of the tissues is extremely low simply by avoiding the polyunsaturated fats. And you see similar things in the liver transplants among humans.

HD: The organs that were transplanted from the animal with no PUFA in its diet, had a lot less antigenic reaction in the body of the recipient?

RP: Yes. So even though their genes and proteins are theoretically antigenic… They should be antigenic, but because of being free of the associated free radical breakdown products of the oxidized fats, those proteins aren't recognized as foreign.

HD: So when we hear about tissue typing, and donor matching, you’re saying that actually, in animal experiments, they’ve taken those organs out of animals who have a fairly disparate genetic makeup, and the organ is still not rejected.

RP: True. And if you look at the age and gender of liver donors, females have a higher level of circulating polyunsaturated fats in the blood and tissues. And those increase with age. And the least successful, the most antigenic, and likely the failed liver, comes from older donors and female donors, corresponding to the accumulation of polyunsaturated fats.

HD: Dr. Peat, let’s take this first caller and see where we’re going. You’re on the air? Hello.

Caller: You had mentioned that estrogen sensitizes the intestines to gluten. How long should someone stay off of gluten before trying it out again? Are the so-called gluten experts correct in saying that you basically have to stay off of it forever?

RP: I think the hormone balance is what makes the difference. You [need to] get your defensive anti-inflammatory hormones up, including thyroid; as the anti-inflammatory T3 part of the thyroid increases, the TSH, which is pro-inflammatory, decreases. And high estrogen goes with low thyroid function and an inflammatory state, which resembles autoimmunity. Animals treated with estrogen are very susceptible to autoimmune diseases. And so, I think the gluten reaction is, in effect, a type of autoimmune reaction. And you have to shift the whole organism, so that it’s acting properly rather than overreacting to inflammatory signals.

Caller: Does that mean that if you're able to do that, then eventually you could actually just eat gluten without a problem in the future?

RP: Yes, I think so. I've talked previously about the intestine as a source of serotonin, nitric oxide and histamine, which promote inflammation. And those things are increased by any stressor; but they’re intrinsic parts of the immune system. And they tend to change with aging and stress. Very recently, there has been research showing that nitric oxide turns off all of the steroids, starting with pregnenolone, in the white blood cells, which should turn off autoimmune reactions. And since nitric oxide turns off steroid synthesis right at the first step, you want to do things that will minimize your exposure to serotonin, histamine and nitric oxide, and increase things that will promote the anti-inflammatory, anti-autoimmune processes.

Caller: Thank you. I just had one other question. If you could maybe give a couple of practical things someone could do when suffering from age-related macular degeneration?

RP: Yes. Thyroid. Sometimes aspirin helps, by keeping down the prostaglandins and polyunsaturated reactive oxygen species. So, vitamin E, thyroid, aspirin, pregnenolone and progesterone are all protective.

Caller: Basically, just everything that works in the way of restoring energy production. Then we could basically say that you should be able to regenerate the cell in the eye, is that right?

RP: Yes, I think so. The cells are tending to regenerate constantly in the brain, retina, pancreas, and so on. Even in sick people, there are new stem cells being born. The problem is to keep them from dying because of the stressful situation in the tissue. And caffeine is another generally protective thing that blocks the toxic effects of nitric oxide and other things that kill cells and deprives them of energy.

Caller: Thank you for that. That was great.

HD: Okay. Thank you for your call. We have another caller on the line. Hi, you’re on the air.

Caller: I don't hear you addressing [the fact] that so many of the diseases, that children get traditionally vaccinated against, have been pretty much wiped out; and they were very deadly diseases. A lot of children died of whooping cough; tetanus was a death sentence; usually diphtheria was. My father almost died of diphtheria as a child, and he was one of the few that made it. His first cousin died of polio because it affected her breathing. I have another friend who went through her whole life with one leg shorter than the other because she had had polio, and that was quite distressful for her. But so many [people caught] smallpox. So many deadly diseases you don't hear about anymore because children were massively vaccinated. So whatever harm vaccinations might cause, they are not anywhere nearly as harmful as the diseases that they've wiped out.

HD: I think that can be contested. And I think that was the point of this evening’s show, was to bring out some of the scientific evidence behind that contest. So perhaps…

Caller: Well, didn’t people die a lot from those diseases?

HD: Well, people die a lot from the kind of diseases that are ravaging the world right now, like the cancers – the massive increase in cancers. People are tragically mentally dying from dementia and Alzheimer's right in front of their families. Autism is becoming pretty rife amongst children and goodness knows what it’s predisposing them to be like in the years to come. So I think whilst you are very true and correct that these diseases have certainly brought around deadly consequences for some of the victims in the world, I think….

Caller: A lot of them, and mostly children.

HD: Yeah, the purpose of tonight’s show was to bring out where we've come from and where we are at now and why it is that there is this supposed need for this massive vaccination.

Caller: Do you think that we should vaccinate children against these deadly diseases, so they don’t get whooping cough and tetanus and diphtheria?

HD: Well, the point of tonight’s show was to bring out the reasons for and against it. And that’s, I guess, where we are going to go with the show. So, perhaps, if you wait a little while and we get further through the questions that I have for Dr. Peat – like I said at the very beginning of the show, his philosophy and approach to this is very different and does seem very shocking at first.

Caller: Well, I just want to know, what would you do without vaccinations? What would you do about all these deadly diseases ? I know we haven't been able to conquer cancer, but we’ve come a long way. It’s not the death sentence that it used to be for a lot of people.

HD: I think what Dr. Peat has said that really hit the nail on the head is that good hygiene, sanitation, and nutrition has done more than vaccination for reducing disease. And it’s the health of the organism that is really the important factor.

So whilst we are not saying “carte blanche” that vaccinations are deadly, and shouldn’t be used, what we are trying to get over is that people’s nutrition state, their life habits, their eventual medications, the quality of their current food supply, their drinking water, the air they are breathing, the sunlight they are not getting, all of these things matter more.

Caller: Well, definitely, it is obvious that a stronger immune system is going to help you ward off all diseases.

HD: Exactly. And we’re going to discuss the immune system, and how experiments have conclusively proved that in groups of animals being taken care off well, as explained above, their outcomes will be significantly better when faced with the same infections that other animals die from.

Caller: Sure.

HD: So I think it's basically not a one way or the other. What we want to do is just open people's minds to things that they may not have thought about. I think that’s the whole point of our shows. They are pretty groundbreaking in terms of getting people to think differently about a subject that so long and so often we get brainwashed with only one way, and actually we don't hear the full truth, and so that’s the whole point.

Caller: I’m all for the immune system, and better eating, and better understanding of all the things that go into that.

HD: Thanks for your call. Okay, we do have one more caller.

Caller: So I am a homeopath, and there's a wonderful book by Richard Moskowitz called 'Plain Doctoring' that has a few hundred pages on very medical assessment of each vaccination. And for one thing, whooping cough is a terribly ineffective one, which is partially why everybody is getting it these days, because they've been vaccinating and vaccinating, and all they do is they have some more vaccine. And it doesn't work very well. Measles [vaccine] works very well. And some of them, like whooping cough have some terrible consequences. And it seems to me it should be in a case by case basis. I would be interested in a tetanus shot, but I don't want a pertussis. I've already had whooping cough and I certainly don't want a diphtheria. There's been [only] 22 cases in the last ten years in the US. So why are they doing it? Money, that’s why. Money. A hepatitis B vaccine in a newborn baby, that’s crazy. Anyway, it’s a wonderful book, but I go both ways. My great grandfather died of smallpox. And all his children had the vaccine and it was horrible and their legs got all red and sort of *****, and he was repelled. And he was a guy, he was a macho in Cuba, and he didn't want to get vaccinated. So when he came in contact with it, he got it and went off and died by himself. So there should be a little sanity; but there isn’t any sanity at all, anyway. So it’s a wonderful book. It’s called 'Plain Doctoring' by Richard Moskowitz.

And he does it very scientifically, not hysterically at all.

HD: Okay, good.

Caller: But my great-granddaughter has had 40,000 [units]. And the granddaughter believes in herd immunity; and I am horrified with so much cancer in the family. Terrible.

HD: Let's get into the adjuvant side of vaccinations and how these have definitely proven to be very toxic and unsafe.

RP: Okay. One of the newer adjuvants of interest is phytol, which is a plant oily material. And heavy metals have been used as adjuvants for a long time. And they are pathogens in themselves when they're in the diet and environment. Since even the conventional immunologists realize that a simple foreignness of a protein isn't enough to make it reactive- isn't enough to make it function as an antigen, even though it's completely foreign… they need [additionally] to make the body treat it as something that’s dangerous, [because] that's what activates the immune system, and effectively keeps the viruses or bacteria from multiplying. 25 and 30 years ago, [in order] to look at the evidence of vaccination, and how an adjuvant makes the immune system react, a few people brought back the innate immunity, following the trend that Élie Metchnikoff sketched out at the beginning of the century. And it's now [being] recognized as the 'danger' or 'damage theory' of the immunity. Wherever [up to that point] it used to be the otherness, the foreignness of an antigen. Now, it's increasingly seen that it's injury that triggers the immune system; it's not at all just the foreignness. And the originators of this “danger” or “damage theory” of immunity are Jamie Cunliffe and Polly Matzinger. And they [elaborated on] the implications of thinking of the immune system as a developmental process,[where] anything pathogenic, which could be radiation, heavy metals, toxic fats and so on, are [actually] the real agents of damage, rather than as an immune process, where foreign organisms [are sought off and seen] as the pathogen. And that's why they have to be used with the bacterium or virus.

HD: The thing I remember is the Thimerosal was causing a lot of damage in people that were receiving it. And I think this is when a lot of the attention came out for vaccinations and the products that were used as adjuvants. And vaccines were then started to be questioned.

RP: Yes, some people think that they're talking about the amount of mercury as a toxin; but it's really the way the tiny amount of toxin, or mercury, or adjuvant, is presented that causes the problem: it isn't the mercury itself. For example, kids whose mother ate lots of seafood turn out to have above average IQs along with a high body load of mercury. So in a healthy body, even mercury isn't necessarily toxic; but presented in the wrong way, activating these adaptive, defensive reactions, it's that [phenomenon] that can lead to things like autoimmunity, that really caused the damage. So when they substitute phytol for aluminum or mercury, for example, I think the effects are going to be just as bad, if not worse.

HD: Alright. So it's all about the potentiation of it.

RP: Yes. It's potentiating the disturbing properties.

HD: Yes. Okay. So I think there is a caller coming in.

SE: Yes. We had a dear listener who wanted to know if I could ask for Dr. Peat to comment on the effects of breast-feeding on the immune health of the child, and as well as its relationship to vaccines.

RP: Milk provides extremely good nutrition, including a relative absence of the harmful iron. Iron is one of the factors in the environment that accumulates and progressively leads to oxidative injury of all of the tissues. Milk also provides various immune protective materials, antibodies and things such as transferrin or lactoferrin, that help to manipulate the body load of iron. Besides [milk] being deficient in iron as a food, the lactoferrin [it contains] helps the body keep its iron in the right place, prevents stress from letting the iron react with polyunsaturated fats, and so on. So, breast-feeding provides undamaged proteins that are really part of the baby's immune system. And even RNA from the mother's body – I think even DNA - has been demonstrated to pass from a mother's milk into the baby's genetic makeup. So, if you’re brought up on cow’s or goat's milk, you get many of the immunological protective factors, but you’re probably also incorporating some of the goat or cows’ genetic material [chuckles].

SE: Are the antibodies released in breast milk an alternative, or a viable option, to any specific vaccines that are out there? Could milk’s antibodies replace their child’s vaccines?

RP: Yes. The mother’s immunity does show up in the baby, if the baby is breast-fed for a couple of years. A part of that transfer is by microvesicles, they’re called, little particles about maybe less than a thousandth the size of a cell. But they contain proteins and RNA, possibly some DNA. And these microvesicles can pass through the intestine wall and circulate as sort of immune cells. Even though they’re extremely small, they can be taken up specifically by cells that they are appropriate for. So they’re kind of like miniature stem cell repair kits that the milk is providing.

SE: And would a longer duration of breast-feeding, say, beyond two years, lead to more active immunities?

RP: Yes. They probably should supplement some iron because usually a baby is born with an overload of iron. The heavier the overload, I think the higher the risk of diseases in the newborn baby. But by the time a baby is about two years old, it has grown into that excess of iron. And around that time, it might be needing some food containing iron such as eggs. But the protective immunity is still being passed along up to three or four years.

HD: I really would like ask you, Dr. Peat, about your current understanding of the immune system and how they tell us vaccines are supposed to be working, and the perceived risk, and the odds of perhaps lifelong struggle with any number of conditions that may have been stimulated by the vaccine (which we’re probably going to find out in maybe another 30 or 40 years). A little bit like the polyunsaturated fat cover-up, which is just coming to light now, with doctors saying that saturated fats are actually better and more protective.

RP: I think part of the picture that people should keep in mind is that, in just the last 20 years, the image of the organism has become more like a continuing stream of developmental changes. [or] the last stage of embryonic development. Or still, just a big, slowly developing embryo, with all of our parts being in play, interacting with the environment. And what happens during gestation and in the first two or three years of life, when there are fewer cells involved: each of those cells [will have] a longer history of descendants. And the more you disturb the organism early in life, the greater the distortion is going to be in adulthood. [And] we're still in process, even after middle age. Stem cells are still being educated and responding, trying to optimize conditions. And so, it's never too late to correct damage that was done at an early stage. But when possible, the early environment should be optimized by avoiding stresses, as far as they can be avoided.

HD: Do you believe it is possible to fully protect an organism from the insults given to it by vaccines, or any other outside influences? Do you think there is a point beyond which the capacity will have reached the maximum point?

RP: There are two types of experiments in mice and rats that, I think, say a lot about human conditions. Germ-free animals, even though they are susceptible to infection because they've never been exposed to infections, happen to be very tough and adaptive, resistant to other kinds of stress. In middle age, their mortality rate is much lower than germ-infested animals. And, for example, they're very resistant to obesity. They can be fed a high-fat and high-sugar diet and they just don't get fat, even though they come from a strain of obese animals. The absence of germs and inflammation makes them resistant to such things as obesity and diabetes. And the other line of experimentation is giving them a diet completely lacking in the so-called essential fatty acids. Those animals are extremely resistant to trauma, chemical poisoning, biological toxins, and so on. They have an extremely strong immune system. They are hard to infect. It takes a huge dose of injected cancer cells or bacteria, for example, to produce a viable infection.

HD: I'll have to hold you there, Dr. Peat. Thanks very much for joining us.

RP: Okay, thank you.

PART 2​

HD: I wanted to open up the show again by what I read out last month, which was the 'first do no harm' tenet of medicine. The United States legal standard applied to vaccines defines them as – and this is how it’s defined – “unavoidably unsafe products that are quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use”. And the reason why vaccines are unsafe, or in other words, harmful, is because they are made up of chemicals and other elements that are essentially poisonous to the body. We will get into some of those things later on in the show. Dr. Peat, thanks very much for joining us again. For those people who perhaps have never listened to this show or tuned in before now, would you just outline your academic and scientific background, so that people can understand where you’ve come from and where you are now.

RP: In the 1950s and 1960s, I was mostly a student and teacher in the humanities, English literature and painting, for example, and other subjects. Then I decided to go to graduate school in biology and biochemistry, University of Oregon, for a PhD, because I had been interested in that for many years, but considered that the academic approach to it was pretty futile and misleading in 1950s and 60s. And since graduating in 1972, I have continued studying, trying to find what I consider the mainline of science in biology, which in many ways is very [misrepresented]; the mainstream medical thinking and the biology [are very] influenced by corporate financing. This mainstream, or mainline of the biological and chemical thinking that I’ve been following is more holistic and developmental. [It represents] a time-oriented way of looking at organisms [compared to] the reductionist, abstract molecular approach that has become dominant. And that particularly relates to how the immune system works. But that isn’t an area that I have specialized in. I did teach a short course in immunology at medical students in Mexico, 1979. But since then, things have radically changed.

HD: Okay. I think for the purpose of those people who perhaps have tuned into this evening’s show, I wanted to start the show with something which will [entirely] stun them, because they probably never really thought about it. I think my generation born in the mid-60s and the children from there, until now probably, have very little awareness of what I'm going to read out next. And that's the fact that all infectious diseases were, in fact, in free fall decline before the introduction of vaccines. And this just doesn’t enter the consciousness of most people. It’s veiled by the fear and mysticism surrounding disease. In most people's consciousness, the reasons for vaccines are the apparent cure of polio and smallpox . When, in fact, this is not the truth. Starting, I guess, in the 1800s, it’s actually the massive overcrowding, open sewers, poor hygiene, poor nutrition that were largely responsible for the pandemics and the epidemics that ravaged Europe at the time. And when the reformations happened, with socioeconomic factors improving (like general hygiene, nutrition, the amount of time people were working, and the kind of housing and living conditions people were in) the figures that I have…

And there’s a book that is written by Suzanne Humphries, a medical doctor and a nephrologist, entitled 'Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines and The Forgotten History'. But she is not practicing medicine within the Medical Association; she was very much put off by what we call the mainstream medicine. And you have already mentioned, Dr. Peat, that the “holistic approach” that a lot of science will take to achieve a truth is largely avoided, or covered up, with continuing mistruths or misinformation permeating the medical industry. She wrote a book on vaccination after coming across a kidney damage that was initiated from influenza vaccines. And she looked at the British records from 1750 (or there abouts) until the present date, for ten infectious diseases prevalent in these times (measles, smallpox, typhoid, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, syphilis, and malaria). And the evidence that she found was that there was a dramatic decrease in their incidence, mostly around the early 1900s to the end of the Second World War. So, why do you think the vaccines have become what they are now in people's minds? Everybody seems to believe we can't do without them. When, in fact, it was all virtually disappearing due to improved health and sanitary conditions.

RP: I think this medical [indoctrination] attitude has been developed for more than 100 years. My parents and grandparents were born really before it got underway in the United States and Europe. [In respect to] the vaccine history, there were people teaching doctors to vaccinate, and indoctrinating the medical community with the idea; but in my parents’ generation, they were pretty immune to it. They were force-vaccinated in the schools; but it was only a somewhat later generation, more or less coinciding with the American Medical Association taking over medicine (abolishing for about 60 or 70 years the natural approaches to medicine, such as naturopathy, and [imposing] the drug treatment approach, rather than the approach of improving general health). Several people fairly recently have pointed out that vaccines are really just a cheap way of controlling some infections when it's too expensive to give people good food and a clean environment. It’s recognized that it would prevent the infectious diseases, but it’s considered too expensive.

HD: How did you feel about this argument that’s been put forward that it’s actually an economic situation rather than a holistic situation? There would automatically be an increase in people's general health if, in reality, we had good, clean food and it wasn't contaminated with GMOs, laboratory produced, but was just good wholesome organic clean food. And if people weren’t brainwashed into believing that butter, sugar or dairy products are bad for you, and ate instead good, wholesome nutrition. But that isn't really in the interest of industries producing supposedly necessary products for our ill health.

RP: Last month, I mentioned the World Health Organization study in Central America that showed that giving a little tiny bit of economic support (such as clean water and a nutritious porridge supplement for pregnant women and children) improved the health of the study village, relative to [the] one that had no intervention, and [the] one that had the intervention with doctors and vaccines and standard medicine, [and where] health went down during the study period. That [study] actually said medicine is bad for you [chuckles]. But even the cleaning up of the environment, which the Rockefeller Foundation was a leader in, trying to prevent hookworm infection, for example, and improving nutrition in schools, that was done because it was realized that sick, undernourished, mentally undeveloped people didn’t make good workers. So there is a way of looking at cleaning up the environment and feeding people that it's good for the corporate economy too. But it happens that it’s even cheaper to use a vaccine and more profitable. Even if it wasn’t necessary. If the environment got clean enough and people were well fed, it would still be very profitable to sell the chemical and vaccination approach to health.

HD: I have a good friend who has done quite a bit of research into vaccinations and who’s had shows here on the subject. She was stating that the regular acellular pertussis vaccination has actually increased the Bordetella parapertussis colonization in children. She says a lot of children have this unknown etiological condition with fever and feeling unwellness, yet without having the typical cough. And it’s caused by the Bordetella parapertussis colonization coming around from vaccination. She claims the whooping cough vaccine is actually responsible for this in itself. Have you heard anything about Bordetella parapertussis?

RP: No, nothing at all.

HD: In terms of the immune system and what happens with vaccination, would you just describe the kind of basic immune system, what they call the innate immune system, versus the kind of adaptive immune system? And then we’ll perhaps talk about adjuvants, the aluminum and the other products that they put in these vaccines, which end coming up as being responsible for various different things.

RP: Currently, the medical community, especially, is emphasizing the difference between the innate immune system, which they speak of as a first barrier to infection, and the adaptive system, able to learn to be specifically immune to invading organisms, and can be trained by exposing it to the organisms (or a fraction of them put into a vaccine). The 1908 Nobel Prize was divided between two proponents of theories of immunity, Paul Ehrlich and Élie Metchnikoff. Metchnikoff was an embryologist, who emphasized the role of phagocytes in destroying or isolating invading material and reconstituting a healthy organism. Ehrlich was interested in the staining properties of cells. And this made him of interest to the chemical companies: he showed that chemicals, which could stain organisms specifically, could also react with equal specificity to pathogens. And the idea of a magic bullet came from his approach to chemical specificity. Mercury and arsenic were early examples. Later came the sulfa drugs, which had some specificity for pathogen killing. But this was the context for almost all thinking regarding adaptive immunity, and how that specificity could be evoked by vaccines. And meanwhile, the developmental, innate resistance that Metchnikoff talked about was ignored. Until Jamie Cunliffe and Polly Matzinger in the 90s revived the concept of danger, or damage, to the tissue (analogous to when Metchnikoff stuck a splinter into a jellyfish and showed that it was engulfed by phagocytes, wandering cells that could eat invading material and turn it to nutritious use). That was a complete re-thinking by the “specific chemical orientation of the adaptive immunity people”, who had [proposed], especially through the 60s and 70s, the idea of the clonal selection of randomly varied molecules in the immune system; the genes were simply turning out random possibilities, and [upon] the exposure to molecules of the host organism or the invading organisms, these would govern the selection or destruction of these randomly generated molecules. Linus Pauling had proposed an instruction theory of the antibodies, in which [our own] protein or RNA would, in a sense, wrap itself around the invading material and then compose a protein antibody, that would represent the exposure to the shape; so it didn't require either an infinite number of genes, or the specific rapid mutation that could generate almost an infinite number of variable molecules. Since the 1990s, the danger theory has been incorporated into the mainstream of adaptive antibody-centered immunity; but it pretty much limits itself to thinking of the innate system as first a barrier and, second, an amplifier of inflammation, which then simply shifts over to making the adaptive system run faster. So they have accepted the innate immunity, but in a very subordinate way, which kind [of consists] of just a first screen, and then a booster, to the system that they have been working out over the last century.

HD: How do you feel about the presentation of [foreign] fragments (core proteins, RNA, etc..) to the adaptive system ? It’s supposedly underpinning the science behind vaccines: the body is preparing memory T-cells that will jump straight into the fore as soon as they come into contact with the organism in its entirety (the bacteria, or whatever the thing is you’re being vaccinated against).

RP: Just by trial and error and empirical results, it’s been known for generations that junk added to an antigen makes it produce more active antibodies. And following that accidental learning, it was found that alum, an aluminum compound, is a good kind of junk, making the peptide or the protein of the antigen to be vaccinated with more effective at forming antibodies. And that was just an observed fact without any theory at all to justify it. One theory was that the aluminum condensed the proteins, sort of flattened them and made a little ball out of them, and that, for some reason, the immune system could better deal with [those] than free-floating proteins. But I think the last five or ten years, the tendency is now to see aluminum as an activator of the innate inflammatory process. So there is this growing awareness that it is creating a general inflammation. Which then makes the specific response of the adaptive system more energetic. So, in the background, it’s recognized that the adjuvant is there probably for the purpose of creating a generalized inflammation in the organism. And that’s where the long-range view of doing no harm is being neglected, because the embryological approach to the organism sees that what happens early in development is going to have permanent lifelong effects on how the organism turns out.

HD: Alright. This was what you mentioned last month about the stream of consciousness, right?

RP: Yes. So if you introduce an inflammatory state early in the life of a person, it’s really a matter of waiting 20 or 30 or 40 years to see what the effects of that are going to be. And that hasn’t been done in any sense, because they were so intent on their simplified molecular view. They talked about the antigen presenting cells, which for many years were simply macrophages that caught the germ and then presented it to cells which could then direct the response of the B cells (bone-derived cells) to make antibodies. But now with the new emphasis on the innate immune system as an inflammation amplifier, it’s recognized that, throughout our skin and mucus membranes, there are cells called dendritic cells, which really are the major antigen presenting cells. Many other cell types can do this, not just macrophages. But the massively present dendritic cells in the skin and mucus membranes are what will do [the majority of this antigen presenting] (the normal germ exposure happens in our skin, our mouth, our nose, lungs). And so, it’s mainly the dendritic cells which capture the antigens and then present them to mostly the thymus cells, which then activate and instruct the production of antibodies, and so on. But this process of capturing/ transferring only works if the organism owns [some of] the cell material, [on their] compatibility [group] factors. These antigens are broken down, digested, and [then] attached in fragments to the organism’s own surface proteins compatibility groups. And it’s the combination of the invading peptides with the organism’s own normal cell surface that the immunity is developed to. And this is, in the extreme form of the danger or damage theory of Jamie Cunliffe, the real essence of the whole immune system; it’s there to restore and maintain the structure of the organism. It’s not primarily designed to attack invaders.

HD: Yeah. Let’s take this first caller. You are on the air, caller.

Caller: Dr. Peat, what’s your thoughts on L-glutamine. I’ve been reading about some people using it to heal stomach ulcers and to restore intestinal integrity.

RP: I think it should be pretty much limited to what’s available in proteins of the diet, partly because when an amino acid is manufactured in a pure chemical form, it's always going to have risky contaminants that aren’t present in the whole natural protein. And, secondly, a lot of people have talked about the glucose dependency of cancer cells, but actually glutamine is a favorite food for promoting cancer cell growth. And an excess of any single amino acid can be harmful for various reasons, including simply overloading you with ammonia as they breakdown. But it's one of the least harmful. So if you had a clean source of it, it would, in some cases, be beneficial, but I still think it’s risky.

Caller: Okay. What's the upper limit of glycine on that topic?

RP: Oh, I think a few grams per day divided into doses of 0.5 to 1 g at a time, I think, would be safe.

Caller: Okay. You also mentioned in some interviews about activated charcoal to help clean up the intestine if carrots and bamboo shoots weren’t doing the job. How would you go about using activated charcoal?

RP: First, you want to make sure that it's clean and hasn't been exposed to contaminants in the environment. Because it will capture things from the air that it’s exposed to. But if you’re sure you have a clean source, you can simply add it to a drink or to food.

Caller: Like a tablespoon at a time?

RP: Yes. It depends on what you’re using it for.

Caller: Okay. All right then. Thank you.

HD: We have a second caller on the air.

Caller: My question for Dr. Peat was about skin tags. And I was just wondering, basically, what’s the underlying cause. And is there anything topically or otherwise that you could do to get rid of them?

RP: I don't really know the underlying cause, but they become very common when a person approaches middle age, the age of 40 or 45. And that suggests that there might be a deficiency of the protective, stabilizing hormones. And since the skin is a major hormone synthesizing organ, making sure that you have enough cholesterol and thyroid in your diet, so that you can make a generous amount of the protective steroids, I think, would be helpful. Some people have used topical DHEAs dissolved in oil, or progesterone dissolved in oil. Or even just micro-pulverized pregnenolone on skin. And sometimes that will clear up a variety of growths on the skin, including skin tags.

Caller: Okay. Another quick question, you guys have been talking an awful lot about inflammation. And I was just wondering how Dr. Peat felt about turmeric or ginger or any other kind of like herbal nutrient that’s supposed to reduce inflammation.

RP: Some people are allergic to those. So even though the research looks very good, especially for turmeric, you want to be very careful with any of those herbal things because they have many other components which can trigger strong allergic reactions.

Caller: Okay, thanks a lot.

HD: Let’s take the next caller. Hi, caller. You’re on the air.

Caller: I know Dr. Peat talked about these students that were having difficulty in topics being taught and I am just hoping to have the subjects of low energy, memory, focus, ADHD developed a bit further. Could you speak a bit about poor memory and focus?

RP: Having an adequate amount of protein in your diet is an essential first thing. And for the average sized person, between the ages of 20 and 60, with everything else being equal, around 100 g of good protein per day optimizes your mental functioning. But there is a study of plane pilots done by the Pentagon, in which a high fat diet was best for their attention and their avoidance of accidents in interpreting information. And thiamine – vitamin B1 - is used to produce energy from glucose. And it can make a tremendous difference if you’ve been at all deficient in it. It’s just spectacular what a supplement of 10 mg or more of B1 can do for your mental focus and clarity. And if it isn’t strictly a simple nutritional problem, it’s often low temperature of the brain. If your brain is only 94 and 95 °F, it just isn’t going to function very well in any sense. There were studies in which the brain temperature was raised just by heating the head on the outside, and they found that memory, quickness of response, clarity of reasoning: all increased as the temperature went up even over 99 degrees. I think it was around 101 where the mental capacity was still increasing.

Caller: Incredible. I am not sure how one would know if their brain is at an optimum temperature.

RP: The ear drum thermometers are the closest way to judge your brain temperature intermediately. The type of mental activity you are doing can affect the eardrum temperature on different sides, differently.

Caller: And to correct that? Wearing a [cap], would that help to raise the temperature or is that a little too exterior? How would one go about that?

RP: It can help. People who have a low body temperature in general sometimes have insomnia because of the stress it causes. And they find they can sleep better just putting on warm socks and a warm cap. And I think wearing a warm cap, if your head tends to run at a low temperature, is likely to help. But the things in the diet that keep your brain temperature up, besides protein, include salt, sugar, and the steroids (pregnenolone, DHEA and progesterone); all help to maintain your proper body temperature.

Caller: You’ve mentioned supplements. I often wonder how well they’re being assimilated. And I know – one would prefer to get them through food. But you don’t see too much of a problem of buying supplements. I don’t know if they can be overdone as well. But an example is protein. I have in the past taken amino acid and protein supplements. 100g of protein would be equal to how many fried eggs, or beef, or chicken?

RP: A 100g of protein per day for even smallish to medium-sized people, in a military study, optimized their ability to work mentally. An example of how to get 100 g of protein would be just 3 quarts of milk; all by itself, [it] would provide just about the right amount. But you could also get it from 15 eggs, or a combination of a quart and a half of milk and a few eggs and some cheese. But you can't depend on the protein in nuts and beans, for example, because their digestibility and quality isn’t equal to the animal proteins, such as milk, cheese and eggs.

HD: Okay. I think we do have another caller on the air.

Caller: A couple of things. I just want to mention – you were talking about covering your head when you're sleeping. I find it really helps to sleep if I cover my head with a towel or a shirt or something like that. It helps a lot. My question was about a galanga or galangal. First of all, I wanted to know, is galanga and galangal the same thing?

HD: Yes. Galanga is, I think, the same.

Caller: They are both the same herb. It looks like a ginger, right?

HD: Yes. It’s an Ayurvedic – Indian herb.

Caller: Galangal is used in Thai foods a lot. And it looks like ginger. And apparently, from some movie I was watching, it’s used in a treatment for some skin cancers, apparently with some other herbs; it breaks down the membrane that protects the cancers from your immune system. [...] Do you guys know anything about it as a medicinal?

HD: I’ve never used it. I am sorry to say that. It is an herb, but there’s lots and lots of them. And it’s not something I have used in alternative medicine. I’ve used lots of ginger, obviously, but not this one. I am sorry. I couldn’t be of no help for you there.

Okay. We do have another caller on the air, so let’s take this next caller. Hi. You’re on the air.

Caller: I’ve heard a lot about L-arginine that that’s good for you. Can you quickly tell me what that does and if it is good for you?

RP: It is a precursor to two very important substances. One is the energy reserve that backs up ATP, creatine phosphate, but the other one is nitric oxide. And very often, if you simply supplement arginine, you are going to boost nitric oxide, which turns off your ability to produce energy.

Caller: So you’re saying that L-arginine by itself is not that good.

RP: Yes. I think it’s fairly predictably a risk.

Caller: Oh. Now, the other thing is vitamin D3, I am not sure what the difference is between vitamin D3 or any other number, but that’s what I was advised to take because I have low vitamin D. Is 5000 units a day, a proper dose?

RP: I think that’s currently believed to be correct for the average person in the Northern…

Caller: So it is not too much?

RP: I have never heard of it being too much.

Caller: Okay. On the bottle, it says take it every other day. And I found that a little odd. So you think it is better to take it every day.

RP: Yea. Many people are doing that. And I think the most informed people on the subject say that it’s perfectly harmless, and will usually be an adequate amount. Where the officially recommended few hundred units per day definitely is inadequate for most people.

Caller: You say sugar is good for you; but you mean sugar from fruits and not refined sugar?

RP: Occasionally, if the rest of your diet is good, refined sugar can be very helpful. Honey, for example, provides basically the same as refined sugar with a few extra chemicals that can be helpful.

Caller: Why is sugar helpful? I heard that too much can overact your insulin and cause you to gain too much weight.

RP: Yes. If you eat too much, and are not getting generally good backup nutrition. I recommend it only for therapeutic specific uses. Generally, getting your sugar from fruit is the best because, of the minerals and other nutrients with it.

Caller: Okay. Alright, thank you.

HD: Yeah. I just wanted to say about vitamin D that, having seen quite a lot of people’s blood work come back from their test for vitamin D, that the reference limit has actually increased in the last year. Most people are low. Most people do not even really reach the therapeutically recognized level of adequate vitamin D. And so, yeah, 5,000 units a day would not seem excessive.

RP: I was talking about seeing the innate immune system as a source of inflammation, and the barrier function, and something to simply turn on the adaptive immune system that the medical world is thinking about. But I think the inflammatory function is, to some extent, a malfunction of the innate immune system. And it’s when the irritation, or damage, has not been repaired quickly enough that you see a noticeable inflammation. I think the innate system really is a repair system. And the signals that it sends out which can become inflammatory, I believe, are calling in repair cells to repair the damage. And it’s ideal function shouldn’t reach the stage of inflammation. And it shouldn’t activate the adaptive system strongly. That’s why I see it as the proper line of development; thinking of the organism in the long-range lifelong pattern of development. You don't want to overburden your system and misdirect it by causing repeated inflammation. And an example of why I think it is not primarily a system of producing inflammation is that pregnenolone has been discovered to turn off the immune cells that are activated, for example, by an injury, or a parasite, or a bacteria getting into your skin or mucus membrane. The cells should produce the reaction and call in repair processes, and then should switch over to producing pregnenolone to stabilize cells and stop the inflammation.

HD: Interesting. Well, we actually have two more callers.

Caller: My question was about the ketosis concept. Is it the best idea to eat mostly fat and a little bit of greens, but no grains and no sugar ?

RP: No, I think it activates the stress system if you’re having to produce the ketones yourself.

Caller: That’s not good? Are you supposed to eat grains?

RP: If you have some in your diet, precursors that are already partly ketones, those are great and are equivalent to sugar, only better.

Caller: I'm not following here.

RP: Well, if you have to turn on the process of making them, it means you aren’t getting enough sugar in your diet, enough glucose or fructose.

Caller: Where do I find this information? Because everywhere I look it says the opposite.

RP: Well, you turn on cortisol production when you don’t have enough sugar. And the cortisol has chronic harmful effect, developmental effects that…

Caller: So you need sugar? Like fruit or from honey or…?

RP: Yea…

Caller: How much sugar do you need?

RP: …like milk. Milk has a fraction of sugar, about equal to the amount of protein.

Caller: Is there any literature that can back up what you’re saying?

RP: There are articles on my website.

Caller: All right. Bye-bye.

HD: Yeah. Thanks for your call. We better call this the end of the evening. And, Dr. Peat, thanks again for joining us.

RP: Okay, thank you.

 

thank you, that was an amazing set of interviews. I am thrilled that you transcribed these.

 

Credit to Giraffe and the LIGHT team.
The interview was informative, but am i the only one noticing Ray seemed very, very wary of condemning too overtly vaccinations?

And Andy Murray was all over Suzanne Humphries, who doesn't exactly inspire trust in me, to put it mildly.

 

Ray is VERY careful, it seems to me, of avoiding political minefields.

I agree with you there @burtlancast

 

Thank you for these, much appreciated