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Richard Helppie
Hello. Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helppie, and we've got a very special returning guest, Dr James Baker of The University of Michigan. He is a physician, he is a researcher, he is an immunologist, and he is an expert on vaccines from his work with the United States Army and with the Merck Corporation. You'll remember Dr Baker from earlier episodes of The Common Bridge where we talked about COVID. We talked about the design of vaccines in general, we talked about the specific designs of the COVID vaccine. He is a recognized authority, a true scientist that is here today to share with us what he knows - well, a little bit of what he knows, because otherwise we'd be here forever. Dr Baker, thank you for coming to The Common Bridge, and it is a pleasure to see you.
Dr. James Baker
Good seeing you again, Rich. We both survived the pandemic to live another day.
Richard Helppie
Yes we did, and I'm not looking over my shoulder about the weird heart attack events that a number of people I know have succumbed to, not even going to go there, because I don't know if there's a data correlation or not. But looking at COVID, is it 100% in the rear view mirror at this time? What do we know about where it started, how it progressed, and how we reacted to it as an American citizen and as a world citizen? What do we know at this point?
Dr. James Baker
I think the first thing we know is that the COVID pandemic took the same course as almost every other pandemic in history in that it came into a population without any immunity. It took out many people that had underlying illnesses. It took out many people that had immune problems. But as people became immune to the virus, they were protected. It's really very interesting if you look at this, what the vaccines really did was accelerate our immunity. It may have taken four or five years for people to develop our herd immunity for natural infection, but in fact, the vaccines really accelerated that. People say, well, the vaccines didn't keep people from being infected. What they did do was keep people from being sick and dying, and that accelerated that, and that was the major advantage that we got from it.
Richard Helppie
If a skeptic heard that and said, did it really keep people from dying? If it let me, as an individual, get the disease - which I did get like everybody eventually, despite vaccinations - did it work? What evidence or data is there that the vaccines had an impact that natural immunity would not have had?
Dr. James Baker
If you look now back at the introduction of the vaccines and look at six months before that, versus six months after, populations that were vaccinated essentially stepped on even those at risk. You could argue that we should only have been vaccinating people who were truly at risk because the other folks weren't getting sick. That might be something that we need to look at, certainly if there's a new pandemic, in terms of the strategies for how we mitigate it. But I think there's good data that shows that the other thing that people keep talking about, well, the virus changed. And that's true, the virus became more infectious, but less deadly. That makes sense, because the virus is trying to survive. It wants to infect more people to maintain itself and it can't keep killing off its host. So, in fact, this is the way viruses evolve. The thing that drives that though is the immunity in our population. If the virus can't infect people tragically and aggressively, it has to tone down the infection and become more contagious and when it does that we become less ill. But it's our immunity that's driving that and it was clear that the biggest evolution in the virus came after the vaccines were out there. So in fact, the vaccines helped drive the immune response and the herd immunity that really forced the virus to mutate out of its deadly form.
Richard Helppie
That is a great explanation, the best one I've ever heard, and your ability to bring that down to a non-scientific person like me is very much appreciated, because my audience is a lay audience and there's a lot of noise out there that the vaccine manufacturers were - for nefarious purposes - pushing this out. Let's stay on vaccines for a little bit. I understand the need to vaccinate vulnerable populations, the elderly people with chronic immune disease and those perhaps with respiratory illnesses, and what about healthy kids? I've heard the assertion many times, and I found no data that says vaccinating children was ever a good idea. What's the data or the conclusion that you've reached? If there is a conclusion yet?
Dr. James Baker
I think there isn't a full conclusion yet, and part of that was because we didn't immunize children in as consistent and defined a manner so we can't draw conclusions. The other thing was that the disease was much less severe in children. On several occasions, I've argued that the US needs to do a Challenger-like commission to review everything that happened in the pandemic and really understand what best practices were, what we needed to do. Clearly, we don't need to close down our schools for a year, as we did in Ann Arbor, but we may need to look at different ways to approach this in terms of at risk teachers versus children who might not really need the vaccine as much, and prioritize those populations that need it. The one thing I could say is that there's no evidence that the vaccination of children altered their immune system or their health in a negative way. The real question is whether or not it provided a degree of positive protection to normal children that they wouldn't have developed from being infected. That's still an open question and I think that it will become an important question, because we're looking at the mRNA vaccine platform as a platform for a number of different infections that are important to children, including RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), including influenza, these are diseases that are more likely to harm children than COVID, and so if we're going to protect them with something like an mRNA vaccine we need more data around that. But I think the the jury is still out entirely on young children and the effect this had, and the potential benefit that was in part because the benefit wasn't as obvious and as defined as it was in adults.
Richard Helppie
During some of our earlier conversations, you were highly instructive for me about the way that vaccines would typically be developed with a live virus; kill the virus, inject that virus, let the immune system build a response, but given the time that we needed to get a vaccine out for COVID, mRNA was essentially chemicals to simulate an infection to try to stimulate the immune system. My understanding, when you talk about a platform - and bear with me again, as a non-scientific person - was that the viruses have like a spike or a pillar on them, and that is quite common to all viruses and then there's like a ball on the end - that evil looking thing - here's the corona spike. Are the vaccines designed now to go after that column or after that spiky ball on top?
Dr. James Baker
First off, we've learned a couple of things. Traditionally, making the virus and inactivating it and using it as vaccine was how we made viral vaccines. As it turned out, the Chinese actually made a vaccine that way for COVID and it turned out to be not very effective. The reason for that is the inactivation step for the virus denatured that ball on the tip of the spike, so you didn't get good immunity to it. What we've now been able to do - and this was worked out at NIH - they were able to re-engineer that protein so that whether it was the RNA or was a recombinant protein like you have with the Novavax vaccine, it was in exactly the right confirmation to make antibodies that neutralized it and also make cellular immunity. It turned out that both the Novavax vaccine, which is protein based, and the the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which are mRNA based, were much more effective than trying to kill a virus. So we actually were fortunate that we didn't try and go the traditional route. In fact, it's the engineering that we've been able to do to characterize this protein and freeze it in its active state that's allowing us to make effective vaccines, and also allowing us, as the virus mutates, to develop immunity to the new mutations, because we can see where those are. We can actually model this on a computer before we even make the vaccine. It's actually very powerful in that way. As I said, I think we've been fortunate that our herd immunity is driving the virus in a way that's less problematic for us. But I do think that we're even farther ahead in what we need to do if there was a new pandemic. We're already looking at this for avian influenza, bird flu. In fact, we have learned some things that should serve us well with future pandemics.
Richard Helppie
Is there a particular place in the world that might be considered the leading researcher into the mRNA vaccines? Is there a gold standard or an authoritative source that people might rely on?
Dr. James Baker
Actually, there are a couple. Most of the the really good mRNA work is going on in the US and Europe, and it's being supported, obviously, by vaccine companies, the startup companies. I guess it's funny to call Moderna a startup company, but Moderna and Biontech are doing a lot of work with this, and now, not surprisingly, there are lots of manufacturers that are involved in this because they see new vaccines coming from this. I think the good news is that the good work in this area is going on in places that we trust. I think one of the other things that we'll get into here for a moment is the idea that we dismiss the lab leak theory as being a potential cause of the whole pandemic. I think you might remember that very early on I didn't think that was a good idea because there was evidence of the Russians and the Syrians and others, who were doing biological experiments, losing control of them. There was a whole village in Russia that got contaminated with anthrax and had deaths from it. So this was nothing new. I think the sad thing is that it became politicized. I think a number of people that I respect were dismissing it, probably more for political reasons than they were for scientific reasons. Unfortunately, finally, now we have the intelligence agencies saying that this might have been the most likely source of this. I think it really harmed people's belief in what the government was telling them. It's a legacy that we now having to deal with, with multiple areas where the people's trust in the government, say, on scientific and medical issues, has been undermined and that's a horrible problem.
Richard Helppie
It is because we seem to have tried to sweep from the public conversation the general things, what we know, what we don't know, what we thought was right turned out not to be right, like ventilators, over the counter medications, and we need to be able to talk about all of it. It's curious, because I don't see people taking victory laps, other than maybe Florida and Sweden, saying, hey, we did a better job. Arguably, they did. But I share your concern about a loss of confidence in public institutions, and it just doesn't pass the smell test. But I understand also that everything they say is going to get filtered through this partisan media model, and maybe hung on to theories too long because they didn't want it out there in that metaverse - not the company Meta - but in general.
Dr. James Baker
The noise out there. I think part of this too was there's a natural want to sound authoritative and to sound definitive, and feeling that that's what people need to feel comfortable and be able to move on. But in fact, if we don't really know something for sure we need to tell people, you need to be honest with me, because sooner or later, it comes back and and really undermines the whole process. I think, the idea that rates of childhood vaccination have dropped dramatically since the pandemic, this is a big problem. I get people all the time that say, well, you don't need measles vaccine, look at the undocumented, they're coming across the border, they aren't vaccinated. Well, in fact, they are vaccinated because their primary countries do primary vaccines. But what we're seeing is that people forget what these diseases were like. I remember in my fourth grade class, which was a long time ago, I had a young woman who was deaf because of measles that she had a very young age. I remember kids that literally had problems walking because of polio. These are not inconsequential things. I think what's happened is that we've forgotten how serious a problem this is. No one wants to see children in iron lungs or in braces again, just to remind people of how bad this is. But something has to be done to reassure folks and and I have to say that there are lots of people who are saying things that I think are undermining this for their own benefit, which is really disconcerting to me.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, I want to get into that in just a minute. But before we leave COVID, other measures like masks and social distancing and some of the things that were absurd - and to your point about public trust - when we saw governors - in the case of our state, mayors in other places, people that work for the NIH - saying, everybody needs to be ten feet apart, gatherings four people or less, mask on and no travel, don't go see elderly people and then they do that.
Dr. James Baker
You've got to wash your groceries with bleach. Don't forget that one.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, exactly. Or when you go to a big store like here in Michigan Meijer, that you couldn't go down certain aisles because the virus was over there, but you could go down other aisles and be safe. Is there any way to measure the efficacy of the social distancing, the masks and the other measures that were taken?
Dr. James Baker
Quite honestly, I think it would be a waste of time for most of the things you mentioned, because there was no rationale behind them to begin with. I mean, it was almost like social shaming, rather than really some type of rational approach to try and and take care of things. I think there were certain things; masking in hospitals is very effective in preventing the transmission of disease. Masking in hospitals is very different than what they were telling people. They were having people basically tie socks around their mouths and half of the time it didn't cover the nose. You need a fit mask that actually seals around your mouth to prevent transmission. I think we need to understand that, and we need to do something along that. What we don't need to do is just dogmatically tell people to do things that we have no data for, and then persecute them when they question them. I think that there were short periods of time when we really had to do something to control the amount of illness, just because the hospitals were becoming overwhelmed. But that was a really short period of time, as it turned out. I think particularly after people became vaccinated the idea that we were continuing this masking regiment for people who had immunity really didn't make much sense. So we need to sit down and go through all these things, just dismiss the stuff that made no sense at all and wasn't based on a rationale, and then go back and look at those limited things. I think hospitals would have been in a lot more trouble if their employees and the physicians weren't appropriately masked. People out in Meijer, probably not, but it was amazing that there were certain types of social gatherings that did seem to cause spreader events or super-spreaders. We need to identify what was unique about those situations, and maybe look at those particular situations in an upcoming problem. There's always some truth to everything but it was so broadly dismissed and people were so - how can I say - really persecuted if they questioned anything. It was not a good situation and we're living with the effects of that right now.
Richard Helppie
In my humble estimation, the three culprits here are basic education of science, scientific theory, scientific method; understanding that there are few absolutes - that's what we know today or what we believe today - and then we're going to keep testing. We seem to have gotten away from that educationally. Our political system seizes on divisions and exaggeration as well as the legacy media model, and so there can't be a rational response. You and I both are here in Ann Arbor - and this is months after the pandemic was said to be over - and I'm walking my dog down to the park and there's a woman that sees me about a block and a half away, and she quickly puts on a mask so she can pass me on the sidewalk, like, that's not how this thing transmits. This is not like measles where one whiff and you're down.
Dr. James Baker
If I were you, I wouldn't put a mask on your dog. [Laughter, cross-talk.]
Richard Helppie
He's actually a pretty good guy. He probably would have put up with it with a quizzical dog look on his face. But to your point, we know that there were choirs, for example... then when students went back to college, Brian Peters of the Michigan Hospital Association, he quipped, he said the virus went from the nursing home to the frat house, because that's where they were getting their cases. Of course, the college kids cleared it pretty quick, they're young with strong immune systems, and they did what college kids do; let's eat a lemon and an onion whole, because we don't have any taste for four days or so. As we morph into the next phase, we don't have anybody doing a victory lap and saying, hey, we conquered that virus. Wish we had that. I wish we had sober discussion like this about what we got right, what we didn't get right. And now we've given vaccines a bad name. We have to all be careful about what we inject into our body but I never was at risk for polio, whooping cough, diphtheria and the like. Now, of course, I had childhood measles, like everybody in the neighborhood, and it ripped through our house, chicken pox and the like. Is there a current set of questions around vaccines in general? Are we doing too much, too little? I'm going to just throw this out there and you can go anywhere you want. We've recently had RFK Jr approved out of committee, and looks like he's on his way to confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services. What do we think now about the vaccine situation in the country, and how might this play into this culture that we're experiencing today?
Dr. James Baker
I think in general, we know that the vaccines that we have are effective. They prevent infections and they, for the most part, have changed childhood. The other thing is that they've done wonders for certain types of diseases in adults. If you look now at influenza, the deaths are down from that because of the vaccine. If you look at RSV, there's a new vaccine that that should protect people with respiratory and cardiac problems and shingles. Shingles is now a preventable disease. With Shingrex, the shingles vaccine, 99% prevent it. I could tell you, anyone that's had shingles knows that this is a worthwhile thing to do.
Richard Helppie
By then it's to late too, right? If you get it...
Dr. James Baker
If you get shingles, it's done.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, in my personal experience with friends and myself, I think it's 50 years old, they recommend the shingles [vaccine] it's two doses. I tripped every switch on the side effects but not attacking my retina. And I had had the previous vaccine, the one dose, and I got a mild case of shingles. And you don't want shingles, it can be prevented. Get the shingles vaccine, you'll not hurt yourself.
Dr. James Baker
I think we can all agree that the vaccines are effective in preventing infectious illnesses. I think the concerns are whether or not there are side effects that are more broadly and less well defined. The problem is, when you're immunizing large populations things happen in those populations. I mean, we were doing a clinical trial with the RSV... actually, with the COVID vaccine first, and we had somebody who was in a car accident and died, and I had to acknowledge that as an adverse event in the clinical trial, that doesn't mean it was caused by the vaccine. It was a month and a half later and they forgot to use their blinker and got hit broadside. But I think we need to continue to monitor vaccinated populations and see whether or not there are correlations with some rare events. We saw this with the AstraZeneca vaccine and in fact, the Johnson-Johnson vaccine for COVID. We don't use those because there was a rare side effect. It was not something was picked up in smaller studies, but by monitoring, we pick these things up. What I can say is that the the incidents of those events and the potential harm from those events appears to be much less than the potential harm from the infections. I think, so far, it argues strongly that we continue our vaccines as they are and continue to monitor them. I think that's an important part of doing this.
Richard Helppie
There are families that are choosing not to vaccinate, and I think the societal debate is... back when I entered school a long time ago as a kindergartner, do you have your vaccines because we're not letting you come in here if you don't have them. When we think about what degree of autonomy, independence, bodily autonomy, do we allow parents to have over their child versus what restrictions do we place on those that don't choose the vaccine? I don't know if you spend much time thinking about this, but I'd sure love to hear any thoughts you might have.
Dr. James Baker
Well, it's very hard. I think... let's take other things that we regulate, one is smoking, right? We don't let people under 18 buy cigarettes. We theoretically don't allow them to buy cannabis or buy alcohol, but that's more of an individual decision. I think some of it comes from the societal effect. Society can be harmed because somebody gets drunk and and runs their car into somebody else and kills a number of people, or they have some other type of event that harms other individuals or themselves. And I think again, it's harder trying to keep people from harming themselves than harming other people. So I think from that perspective, if you harm your children by not vaccinating them and having them get measles and wind up with an inflammation of their brain or something that disables them, do you expect, then, society to take care of that child? Almost uniformly, people will say yes. Well, that's a problem. If you say I know my child has increased risk for these infections, but I've rationally looked at that, and I've set aside ten million to take care of them if they become disabled, I think that's one thing; good luck. I think if we can keep rates of vaccination over 90% there's going to be enough herd immunity that these individuals will be affected basically themselves.
Richard Helppie
They're kind of a free ride, if you will.
Dr. James Baker
On the other hand, if they really expect social security disability payments to take care of this child and to provide care for them and to provide unique schooling for a child that can't go to a regular school, you're asking society to pay for your malfeasance with the vaccine.
Richard Helppie
There was a whole area of medical ethics. So by way of example, if someone's a lifelong smoker and they get emphysema, lung cancer, we still treat them any other cancers, as we now know. If you have a person that eats high fat food when they have choices for others, and they're sedentary and they have a coronary event or need a bypass, we still take care of them. There's not a judgment with the physician. I've said a lot about our awful payment system. It's not even a system, it's methods. And we need to start with data. One of the things that occurred in COVID was people said our hospitals are full of COVID patients. What they didn't understand was that the presenting diagnosis may have been - like in your car wreck example - but because there's a communicable disease, you've got to test for it, because you want to isolate them. You don't want to [put them] in a semi-private room, you don't want your roommate to be COVID positive. So it gets coded that, yep, that's another COVID patient in the hospital, and somebody not familiar with the data and how it's captured says, oh my goodness, our hospitals are getting overrun with COVID patients.
Dr. James Baker
Actually, it was worse than that, because the government had set up a system where if you died with COVID, you got paid $6,000 out of the emergency funds. So in fact, even if you died from something else but had COVID, they described it as a death from COVID so the family could get the $6,000. So there was a perverse incentive there to emphasize the COVID infection.
Richard Helppie
I harken back to your earlier point about people not trusting the institution because we can't get that out of there. It goes back to one of my central themes, education is so important, and one of the things all of us Boomers need to understand; if we don't get after the fixing of our elementary schools, where that basic education is, we're not going to have educated people to look after us in the last run of our life. We need to make sure that people are grounded in facts, grounded in reality, grounded in the scientific method, and understand this balance but yet we have fire brands. Let's talk about RFK Jr, and if you'd rather not, we can just move on. I have no idea what your view on this guy is. I do note that we had the red dye number three in everything, and as the election results became manifested in nominations, all of a sudden, the FDA pulls red dye number three. Kennedy, I watched a lot of his hearing. He's very well versed in the economics of pharmaceutical industry and such.
Dr. James Baker
I would disagree with that to some degree, but go ahead.
Richard Helppie
I understand enough about the economics of pharmaceutical. What I couldn't follow, I don't have enough clinical depth to understand what he was saying vis a vis the impacts of the medications and such. RFK Jr, potentially, and probably almost certainly, I guess, at this date, is going to become the next Secretary of HHS. Does that keep you up at night? Does it make you sleep soundly? Something else?
Dr. James Baker
I've interacted personally with him on several occasions. Obviously, let me disclose that I was the head of the vaccine franchise at Merck. Merck produces probably one of the most remarkable vaccines, called Gardasil, which essentially is ending cervical cancer as a problem in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of women who are dying and whose children are being infected because of HPV, which causes cervical cancer, human papillomavirus, and this vaccine is totally effective. I think if I look at RFK Jr's career - and for a minute, I will put aside Caroline Kennedy's letter about him that calls him a predator and a poisoner of human beings who's destroyed the lives of several of her family members - but I think he has always shed more noise than light on these issues. And I think I have been very honest about whether or not I still have some Merck stock... it's dropped by a third recently, not because of anything he's done, but because of sales issues. But the fact that he has been part of a class action lawsuit against this vaccine, not providing education, but providing patients. He's out there scrounging for patients to give to the law firms and he's getting a finder's fee for this. That really is beyond the pale, and the fact that he did not even admit to that until he had his hearings and had to come across with his conflict of interest statements, I think that's a problem. Number two, I would agree that there are lots of health issues. I would agree with him that the US is much more problematic than the EU in terms of dyes and things that are allowed in our food. I think that there are also incredible problems. Our health care system has become so opaque in how things are funded that we can't even figure it out. We have all these middle men that are billion dollar companies that came out of nowhere and seem to provide very little benefit, but are taking money out of the system. So yes, I would agree that we need to address that or healthcare is going to go broke and right now we can't take care of the people we have. When they added 30 or 40 million people through Obamacare and the exchanges, that was a good thing to get them healthcare, but they did it without increasing in any way the supply of healthcare so, in fact, you try to get a visit with your primary care doctor, number one, it'll take a year. Number two, you'll probably see a nurse practitioner or physician's assistant who may not be fully trained. The system is collapsing on itself. So I agree we need to address these issues. The real question is if RFK Jr is the right person to do that. I think everything I've observed from him on numerous occasions... he also thinks that the food allergy epidemic is caused by vaccines. I would argue that although he claims in the intro to one book that he wrote that he calls me out by name as someone that agreed with him, it's not quite right, but I don't think he has... I mean, in a way, he has the craziness it takes to blow up these things. I mean, that's why they've got Musk doing it. But we need somebody who also has a deep understanding of the economics of our healthcare system, and is not just going to wave their hands and yell about things without making the concerted effort to fix it. I just don't see him doing that. He's never fixed anything. He's always raised issues. It turns out now that most of the time he's doing that, it's for his own financial benefit. So that's my concern. The other guys they brought in are both - one running the FDA and the one person running the NIH - a bit contrarian, but they're both excellent people who really understand their areas and I think they'll be fine. I worry about the CDC. We had real problems with the CDC under Bob Redfield and his successor because they were not public health doctors. They were infectious disease doctors, both of them focused on AIDS, and that really didn't prepare them well for the types of problems the CDC deals with. We're now making a former congressman who's a primary doctor the head of the CDC. That person is ill prepared for public health issues. I would like to see people with a better background in public health. I mean, the last person running the CDC, you didn't hear much about her because she was a public health doctor, and she actually fixed things, sometimes that's what you need. But I'd like to see a better cadre of people, again, who have open minds, who are willing to address these things and really advance public health in the US society in a way that people will trust it again.
Richard Helppie
Well, I hope that this episode is seen by somebody in the administration. I have Dr Baker's number, if you want to call me, I can put you in touch with him because he'd do a great job in any of those roles, because he has that balance. Dr Baker, we talked about a lot of things about vaccines. So Gardasil, there's also a vaccine for hepatitis B, and I believe that it's pretty solid. These work. And then the question is, when? So the case... Rand Paul, who is a physician - I believe is an eye surgeon, but I'm not 100% sure - said hepatitis B, yep, we need the vaccine, but maybe not a one day old baby. At what point does that child become at risk? Maybe we don't bombard little ones with so many vaccines. I think we should continue to be alert and unravel that.
Dr. James Baker
By the way, I would agree that that's a legitimate question that we need to look at. In Asia, they have to do it at birth because all the mothers are infected, so they infect the child, literally at birth and congenital infection is very bad and results in hepatoma liver cancer. Here, it's not the same. So I think I agree with Senator Paul that we need to look at things like that for sure.
Richard Helppie
It's a shame, as you and I are having this conversation, that our hearings for people that are actually going to do the job turn into scream fests and histrionics and partisan cartwheels. It's like entertainment and these are very serious issues. To your point about the healthcare financing methods, the only people that like the current system, they're named United Healthcare, Anthem, Blue Cross-Blue Shield. (Dr. Baker: Don't forget the PBMs.) Yeah, well, the PBMs, of course, are the pharmacy benefit managers, which is basically a money laundering way around a lot of the restrictions. And if I were president and there was one change I could make, I would take away the tax preferred status that lets people buy their insurance through their employer. It would implode that market and would drive us to a better place. It's insane that we have to re-up insurance every single year for things that have a very long period before they manifest. Better diet, better exercise, better rest, better housing, all the things that we know, the social determinants of health, are nowhere around our healthcare system. But as soon as you're victimized by one of those things and you have a heart attack, then we're going to throw millions of technology at you. To your point about, do we have enough physicians, we're probably not leveraging technology. But as a budget control process, the Clinton administration drug out a Civil War era law called the False Claims Act, that was designed to prevent people from selling a lame horse to the government, and accused healthcare providers of making false claims to the government because they couldn't logically back up every procedure that they did. The system we have right now is not a system. It is a mess, and there's so much clarity around what needs to be done, except in one place, and that's the people that we actually hired to do it, which is a little troubling, but maybe people will hear this episode and talk to their representatives. Dr Baker, once again, you have been incredibly generous with your time, and I learned so much from you as we come to the end of our talk today, what didn't we cover that is important and any closing comments that you might have?
Dr. James Baker
One of the things that really struck me this week, we worry about putting things in our bodies. We worry about vaccines or drugs but in fact, there was an article this week that showed that nano and micro plastics are being accumulated in human bodies, in the human brain, and in fact, people with dementia have more plastic in their brain than you'd see in a disposable spoon. So we need to look broadly at determinants of health. We need to look broadly at the environment. Those floating multi-mile islands of garbage, those are all plastic, and that's all breaking down in UV light into small pieces that the fish eat, and then we eat the fish. Long term, these things will be much bigger issues than some of the side effects we see from drugs and vaccines. I agree with the people that say we need a much more holistic approach to health and chronic disease, which is going to be - because of us Boomers - the next wave that hits this country. If we don't do it now, it's going to overwhelm everything and so I agree with you. We need to move forward. We need to think of health differently and we need to finance it differently.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Dr James Baker, renowned physician, researcher, immunologist, deep experience in relevant medical vaccination, disease matters, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Dr Baker, thank you for the time today. We always have a spot for you on The Common Bridge anytime you'd like to spend time with us. This is your host, Rich Helppie with our guest, Dr James Baker, signing off.
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