[00:00:01] Luke: Andy, you have an accent that's not reminiscent of most people that I meet in Texas. So how did you end up here, and when?

[00:00:09] Andy: Obviously, I'm British. I was born in the West of England, and I went to medical school at St. Mary Hospital medical school, part of the University of London in 1976. Graduated in 1981, became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and Pathologists, and was really running a big research team at the Royal Free Hospital-- also part of the University of London teaching hospital.

[00:00:37] And it was never going to go to America. I might travel there, but no, these strange American people and heard all kinds of things about them. And I then fell foul of the system because parents called me. I got a call, I think 19, gosh-- when was it? 1995, May of 1995. Mother telling me that her child was autistic.

[00:01:15] And I said, you must have got the wrong number. I was a gastroenterologist. My interests were inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis. And we were doing some really exciting research in getting to the origins of those diseases. So I said, you must have got the wrong number. I know nothing about autism.

[00:01:34] When I graduated from medical school, we weren't even taught about it. It was so rare. I didn't know how rare, but I knew it was. And it turned out to be about one in 10,000 children, if that. So she said, "The reason I'm calling you, Dr. Wakefield, is because my child has intractable gastrointestinal problems, and the doctors and nurses that I've told about it say, that's just part of autism. You'll just have to get over it. Forget about it. Put them in a home. Have another child and move on. Forget about them." This was the perception of autism at the time.

[00:02:09] It was untreatable. That was it. Tragic. Sorry. Have another child, move on. But the story of the parents told, now you heard this many, many times after that, the original mother said, there's an epidemic of this particular problem, and she introduced me to a number of other families who've been affected in exactly the same way.

[00:02:29] Normally developing child, speech, language, acquiring skills, developmentally normal. Then they received, in many cases, an MMR vaccine, measles, mumps, rubella, and they regressed into autism very soon after they some event. May have been a seizure. May have been terrible gastrointestinal upset.

[00:02:52] May have been just loss of consciousness or loss of cognitive skills that happened very quickly. And it was part of a continuum. They then got worse and worse and worse until they were finally diagnosed with autism. And the gastrointestinal problems, they said, went along with that, but they happened at the same time. It wasn't coincidental. This was such a consistent story.

[00:03:19] And so I decided to put a team together, some very good, some very renowned gastroenterologists together to actually get to the bottom of this, what's happening in these children. And that's what we did. And lo and behold, as is almost invariably the case in medicine, some of the parents were right. The mother was right. The mother knew what was going on in her child. The children had an inflammatory bowel disease.

[00:03:44] It wasn't Crohn's disease. It wasn't ulcer colitis. It was something different. It wasn't food allergy. And when we put those children on a diet, again, on the recommendation of the parents, when we put them on a diet that took, say, gluten or caseine, cow's milk products out of the diet, wheat-based products out of the diet, then there was traumatic improvement.

[00:04:11] Now, this flew in the face of everything that you were taught about autism. By this stage, I started researching it. And autism was incurable, untreatable. That was it. It was no recovery. But these children were clearly demonstrating signs of recovery. It wasn't just that these children were in pain and that pain had been relieved, and so they were feeling better.

[00:04:33] They started using words that they had stopped using, for example, five years ago. And there was a genuine recovery of cognitive function that went along with the improvement in their intestines. So when they said to me, my child regressed after an MMR vaccine, I had a professional and moral obligation to take that very, very seriously.

[00:05:00] That is the reason I came to America, because that was the end of my career in England. Once you cross that line, once you cross the Rubicon and you question something that is public health dogma, that is a religion, that is making a fortune for the pharmaceutical companies, then you're in big, big trouble.

[00:05:29] The dean of the medical school, Harry Zuckerman, said to me, "If you continue with this vaccine safety work, then it will not be good for your career. That was an explicit threat. He was absolutely right. It wasn't good for my career, and I lost my job at the Royal Free Hospital. And even though I had tenure, they made it impossible for me to continue working there.

[00:05:55] And I decided that that was the stage at which I had to come to America. I'd been lecturing here for a while, and the story was exactly the same from the parents, and there were many, many more of them, and they needed help. The children needed help. So I teamed up with a group of people here in Austin, Texas, and set up a clinic.

[00:06:19] That lasted for a good few years and did a lot of good for children, but in the end, they caught up with me there as well and made it impossible for me to continue. So yeah, that's how I came to the United States of America.

[00:06:35] Luke: To find more freedom.

[00:06:38] Andy: I was essentially a professional exile.

[00:06:44] Luke: I think many of us, especially in the past few years moved to Texas specifically, even us Americans, for that same reason. And then you find that the system has a way of finding you and continuing to encroach, to greater or lesser degrees depending on where you are.

[00:07:02] What do you think it is in your makeup, in your character that has given you the stamina and fortitude, or even just the moral obligation to begin with? I think a lot of people in medicine turn the other cheek and take the road of cowardice, even if they're aware of some issues like this. And of course there are many other issues with the medical system, but someone like you is such an anomaly in the great scheme of things.

[00:07:37] I think people either lack integrity and they know what's happening and they don't care because they're making money. Or they know, and there's maybe a sinking feeling they have inside that it's not right, but they don't seem to have the ability to come forward in ways that you have. Did your parents instill this in you or?

[00:07:57] Andy: I like to think it's more than just being obstinate. I came from a long line of doctors. I was one of the sixth generation of doctors in my family who actually trained at St. Mary's Hospital medical school. So six generations, now seven generations of my family.

[00:08:15] And you're raised in medicine to put the patient first above all things, all considerations. And that's my belief. That was my belief. And so when I went to-- we started this work, and I engaged the help of some of my pediatric colleagues, and they said to me, "Andy, as pediatricians, we cannot be seen to question the safety of MMR vaccine."

[00:08:46] I said, "What does that mean? What does that mean? What about the parents? What about the children? You cannot be seen to question it. Even if there's a coherent reason, a logical reason to do so, you can't be seen at the Royal Society to be questioning the status quo. It won't be good for your reputa-- is that what you're saying?"

[00:09:07] And so that made me angry. It made me redouble my efforts and work twice as hard on it. And I guess that's part of the dilemma. That was my belief. It was very straightforward. It wasn't that I was particularly brave or clever. It was just, what am I going to do?

[00:09:28] Go to the clinic and say to the mother and her child, careering around the room, tearing it up and say, "I'm terribly sorry. I know you are right, but this isn't going to be good for my career. So would you take your child, and there's the door? Go and find someone." It wasn't me. I couldn't do that. And so I didn't do it.

[00:09:49] Luke: I hope some physicians hear this episode and follow suit. I doubt that any that wouldn't follow suit are going to listen to this conversation, but I don't know. Just having had experiences with doctors with much less meaningful consequences, it's just crazy. I remember we went to a free clinic here a couple of years ago. Or not a free clinic, but just a 24-hour clinic.

[00:10:15] Because my wife had a cold or flu or something. And they couldn't figure out what was wrong with her, of course. And they said, well-- what'd he say? He wanted to prescribe some medication, and my wife said, "What about taking vitamin C? Or just getting some more sun, getting my vitamin D levels up? She was just in earnest, curious.

[00:10:39] He just scoffed at her. "There's really no scientific data to support that that would help. But if it makes you feel better mentally, go ahead." I'm just like, "This is where we are, man." This guy's an MD, and he is just like, poo-pooing vitamin C and sunshine.

[00:10:55] And I thought it was just, as I said, a much less severe example of that, but it was a great representation of like where we are. That it wouldn't be lost on him to dismiss something that's so fundamentally obvious and true. So yeah, I don't know. I just personally try to interact with that system as little as possible.

[00:11:21] It's just a lot of the reason I talk to people like you and other scientists and doctors and experts in the realm of just wellness and personal responsibility. Because man, that system just seems increasingly corrupt. So if it was one in 10,000 in 1995 for autism, what are we looking at today?

[00:11:45] Andy: Now we're looking at about one in 20 children.

[00:11:48] Luke: Oh my God.

[00:11:49] Andy: So one in 28 year olds now have an autism diagnosis. It affects boys more than girls in a ratio of about four to one. So that is 80% of the boys born today may go on to get a diagnosis of autism. And that's really alarming. No country can sustain that at attrition of its population.

[00:12:19] And so this was another thing that the parents said. They brought to me certain observations they've made that their child regressed. They were perfectly normal. They responded well to something that was not meant to help at all, a dietary intervention, and that there was an epidemic of this particular problem.

[00:12:40] But the system said, "No, there isn't. We're just better at making the diagnosis. We are better at diagnosing these children." No, you're not. No, you're not. The best diagnosticians in medicine were not of this century. They weren't even of the last century. They were of the century before.

[00:13:02] People, for example, working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot. People like Tourette for example, or Babinski, names that are household names today. These people were outstanding clinicians. They listened, and they could examine patients far better than we can today.

[00:13:24] They couldn't treat it. They didn't have the treatments we had available, but they were outstanding clinicians in terms of diagnosis. So had something as unusual, something as interesting and idiosyncratic as autism existed, then they would've described it extremely well in the literature. It didn't exist.

[00:13:47] So this is a real increase, and we need to get beyond the arrogance of medicine that says this is just a better diagnosis or changing diagnostic criteria. When I was at the Royal Free Hospital, when we first came across these children, the cleaning woman in the clinic diagnosed them. This is not difficult. This really isn't difficult.

[00:14:13] And had these children existed in the past and they would've been picked up, characterized, not to say that there weren't occasional cases associated with congenital rubella syndrome or opiate abuse or whatever it might have been, but nothing like the extraordinary epidemic that we see at the moment.

[00:14:32] Luke: Those numbers are just unfathomable. I was born in 1970, and I don't recall ever seeing an autistic kid in my entire childhood in a year in school. I think there were cases where maybe a kid had down syndrome or legitimate mental retardation, but even that, amongst a student body of 100, couple hundred people in the small towns I lived in, there was maybe one or two kids that had some developmental challenges. So to think about those numbers comparatively, it would've been half my school was autistic or something. It's just crazy.

[00:15:17] Andy: Oh yeah. They're devoting classrooms just for autism now. They're devoting schools just for autism. And as you say, this simply didn't happen.

[00:15:26] Luke: Yeah. And I have two close friends now that have autistic kids, and even as an adult, they're the, I think the first and only two I've ever known. But out of a group of, say, 20 people of my close friends, even two sets of parents having that issue is quite a lot.

[00:15:47] Andy: And you've met these children.

[00:15:48] Luke: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:49] Andy: And would you have missed them historically?

[00:15:51] Luke: Oh, no, no. Yeah, it's very obvious. And it's very specific, the symptoms. You're not sitting there wondering, oh, they seem a little off. You're like, that's an autistic kid. That's how defined I think these issues are.

[00:16:10] What about the immunization schedule? I've seen some of these graphs at the end of your Protocol -7 film. There's a really shocking graph that shows-- I forget. It begins in the late '60s or somewhere up until 2024. And it's just like, oh, we went from three shots to 80 or something. It's absolutely diabolical.

[00:16:34] Andy: Yes. It was an enormous cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry. They had no liability for damage done by their vaccines, death or injury. And they had a mandatory market. Children were obliged to get their vaccines to go to school. So you have the perfect business model. No liability at one end, and a mandatory market at the other.

[00:16:58] All you can do is make a massive profit, which is what they did. And so they decided to put more and more and more vaccines onto the market for lesser and lesser and lesser diseases. So now the children are saturated with these vaccines. Is any wonder that their immune systems, their growing immune systems, their developing immune system are damaged or perverted or responding in the wrong way?

[00:17:27] And so it's not just autism, but a whole host of immune mediated problems. Asthma, eczema, hay fever, all of these things that are major problems in children now. And fortunately, Bobby Kennedy is going to be looking into this. Very few people would want to touch this third rail that challenged public health in the pharmaceutical industry, but it's got to be done.

[00:17:55] I did it for many years. They eventually accused me of fraud. And this is the end of-- anyway, it takes five minutes to accuse someone of fraud. A scientist or a doctor, it takes a lifetime, if ever, to shake off the doubt and the label that come with that allegation.

[00:18:20] And if you control the media, which the pharmaceutical industry largely does through direct-to-consumer advertising in this country, then you can get your message across while preventing the contrary message to reach the public. And that's what they did, is they accused me of all kinds of things, which were totally untrue, completely baseless. Didn't matter.

[00:18:48] They've done this now. Everybody's familiar with cancel culture now after COVID. But back then, no one knew about it. It was just me. It was me. And this isn't a hard luck Andy Wakefield, just a historical fact of life, is that there was me on one side, a young physician, and on the other side you had the World Health Organization and UNICEF and the pharmaceutical industry.

[00:19:20] You had the governments of the world, the public health authorities, the American Academy of Pediatrics. It just went on and on and on. So the odds were not great, I have to say. And you can do one of two things in these circumstances. You can just say, "This isn't for me." Roll over, submit, give up.

[00:19:43] Or you can say, "No. You know what? Who do I represent here? I represent these children. They don't have a voice. So someone needs to be that voice. So am I going to quit? No, I'm not. This isn't about me. They make it sound like it's about you. Look at that evil guy. He did this. No, he didn't. But if you can convince the population that that's the case, then it's very much easier for you to make your case.

[00:20:14] And this went on for a very long time. It was very dark, a very, very dark time. But when I came to realize that actually this wasn't about me at all, it was about these children, and these children had no voice. So someone has got to be that voice for them. Not just their parents, but someone who was sufficiently qualified to represent them in a scientific arena, a public health arena.

[00:20:41] And so that was how I saw my role. Finally, they put an end to my medical and scientific career. And interestingly, what had happened is that over the years, because of the position I'd taken, people came to me from the pharmaceutical industry, from the vaccine manufacturers, and from federal agencies like the CDC or the FDA or the Department of Health in the UK, and said, "We've done a terrible thing. Here is the evidence."

[00:21:15] And so I became a repository for whistleblowers, and I realized that these would make extremely good movies, tell these as stories or documentaries. And so that's when I decided to become their worst enemy and turn them in--

[00:21:34] Luke: Become a filmmaker.  

[00:21:35] Andy: Become a filmmaker.

[00:21:35] Luke: They created a monster, right?

[00:21:37] Andy: They did.

[00:21:38] Luke: By vilifying you, the scientific and medical career, it is like, oh, cool. I'm going to pivot and probably-- well, not probably. I'm sure you've done them much more damage as a filmmaker than you ever could as a lone clinician in Texas, helping families one by one. When you've been approached by these whistleblowers, have you ever personally felt a sense of danger just from through your association with them?

[00:22:14] Andy: There are fleeting moments of, what's going to happen? But no, there's no point in thinking about it. The question you have to ask yourself, is this going to alter what I do? And the answer is no. I'm going to do it anyway. So get on with it.

[00:22:33] As long as you are confident in the facts of the case and the message that you are putting across in the film, it's high-risk stuff because these are big firms, they can sue your ass. They can really make your life hell. What have I got? Nothing. But the question is, do they want to do that? Do they really want to make this public? Becomes a new film, if you like.

[00:23:05] So it's a risk, but it's a risk worth taking. Someone's got to push the envelope a little. And that's what you're able to do with film and stay within the bands of integrity and honesty, but tell the truth.

[00:23:24] Luke: Yeah. I think someone has to do it. Because someone has to be the first person to run the four-minute mile to see when someone like you puts their neck out there. I find it inspiring. I was really honored to meet you. I'm like, "Wow, I have a little podcast here. I talk to a few controversial people that have been canceled or have contrarian ideas." But I'm relatively safe because I'm not the-- you're the one talking. I'm just asking questions.

[00:23:59] So it's like I have a little bit of immunity there. But every time I see someone like you take it a step further and really put their neck out, it's inspiring, and it creates a new baseline. Not only for what's possible, but for what we're called to do. It's like, wow, if you can do that, then what am I really doing to support this cause? And we all choose our battles, of course.

[00:24:22] And the one you've chosen, I think is probably one of the, if not most difficult ones, especially in the realm of medicine because it's the sacred cow, it's the linchpin of the whole system, I think-- the vaccine.

[00:24:34] Andy: It's interesting you should mention the four-minute mile. Sir Roger Banister was my neurology teacher at St. Mary's Hospital. He at St. Mary's. Along with my father, they worked together. They were both neurologists. And a little anecdote, I was invited to his Christmas party once, and I went along. I was a medical student.

[00:25:01] I was scruffy medical student, and there was a very attractive physiotherapist at his party. I was trying to impress her. I was got talking to her, and they had candles on the mantlepiece. I knocked over one of the candles, didn't even notice that it had happened, and it set light to the wallpaper over the fireplace and it just-- this the physiotherapist tapped me on the arm and pointed to this. And I grabbed the drink and threw it over.

[00:25:37] Lady Banister, his wife, came past with a tray of food, and I said, "I'm terribly sorry." She said, "Oh, don't worry. We'll have it redecorated." Walked on. Very calm. Very cool. I wasn't invited back.

[00:25:54] Luke: So in your film Protocol-7, which, yeah, I don't want to spoil it for those that haven't seen it. I highly recommend that you do so, and we'll put that in the show notes at lukestorey.com/wakefield. We'll put a link to it. I watched it on Amazon. It's a scary film because you know that this is the reality that we live in.

[00:26:22] But on the other hand, I felt it was almost tame in the great scheme of things in that the case is really about falsifying a pharmaceutical company, Merck, in this case, falsifying their data to prove efficacy for their product to get it approved by the FDA. It's pretty tame in terms of the evil that these companies perpetuate. They're just falsifying data to get it approved. It's not even about the fact that it's maiming and killing so many people.

[00:26:59] It's like now in the era of COVID and the pharmaceutical debacle that came on the heels of that, it's like, wow, that movie in and of itself, I think, would be terrifying from one perspective. But it's so much bigger and so much worse than that even. So I feel like what you did with that film was really smart because you're kind of like, "Here's just one little example of just one case." And litigation around that.

[00:27:31] But it's like, man, if you zoom out, this monster is just so much bigger than that. So I'm curious why, of all the sort of scandals in relation to vaccines, did you choose that one particular case?

[00:27:45] Andy: I think because the evidence was so convincing. If you're going to make a film and before it goes out, it's going to go before lawyers and they're going to tear it up and say, "You can't say that. You can't say--" well, do you have evidence, proof for that? You have to make sure that everything you say is entirely justified.

[00:28:04] And so it was a story that was real. It was going on in court at the time it was made. It had a direct impact on the wellbeing of people. And the reason is it wasn't just about did the vaccine work? Was it efficacious? The problem with mumps is that it's mild in children. it's a mild disease. CDC said, we don't even need a vaccine for it when it was originally proposed by Merck.

[00:28:35] And what happened was that when you get mumps later in life, after puberty, particularly in men, then you can suffer severe complications, testicular inflammation, and infertility. And so if you have a vaccine that doesn't work or only works for a short period of time, but someone thinks they're protected, and when they reach that more dangerous period of life post puberty, and they're still susceptible to mumps, you've got a major problem.

[00:29:10] And this has happened across the world. Major outbreaks of mumps in student populations, in adult populations, on board a Navy destroyer, and suddenly it's a much bigger issue because you've turned a mild childhood disease into a much more dangerous adult disease because your vaccine doesn't work and certainly doesn't work as well as you've said it does to the FDA.

[00:29:42] So it goes far beyond just the issue of this vaccine is a little weaker than we thought or isn't-- so it's a big, big issue. And it also is a reflection of the attitude of those in the industry. It's in the corporate interests. Forget about the patients. Forget about the children. Forget about the lies we've told about how well this works. They're irrelevant. We all signed a contract, putting the company first above all other things.

[00:30:16] Luke: Shareholders.

[00:30:17] Andy: Yeah. And that's what it's about, the stock price. So they're going to do everything they can to protect the stock price, not to protect the pediatric population. And so people get a clear insight into though, thinking, this corporate mentality that operates pervasively.

[00:30:38] Luke: Eric Roberts, who is the villain of the film, he did a great job. He's very easy to hate. But the thing about it is, is it's so close to reality, if not just 100% on target of reality. This is how these institutions operate. And I think it's hard for feeling compassionate, normal people to be able to comprehend that there are people that are objectively evil at the helm of these corporations and institutions.

[00:31:16] Andy: It's even worse than that because when we made the film, only a certain amount of information was available to us that had been given to me by the whistleblower. The documents had been sealed in the court case, and there were many, many, many documents that were relevant to this case we didn't have access to.

[00:31:36] Now there's the risk. You're going into this, and you're thinking, "Are there documents that we don't know about that exonerate Merck?" Quite the opposite. When those documents were put into the public domain, they showed that Merck's behavior, it was actually far worse than we portrayed in the film. So we were just scratching the surface of their corporate fraud. Yeah.

[00:32:02] But the case was lost. Do you know that? The case was actually lost. Merck won the case. Why? Not because they didn't commit fraud. Not because they denied committing fraud. Not because the judge said they didn't commit fraud on the basis of the evidence. They did.

[00:32:19] The judge said it is not material. Whether they committed fraud or not is not material because the government in the form of the CDC went on purchasing that vaccine knowing that it was at fault for its vaccines for children program. And so it can't have mattered. Well, it did matter.

[00:32:40] The reason that they had to go on buying it was that the children had to be, in the eyes of the government and the public health authorities, protected from measles and rubella as well. And they've been bundled up in a trivalent vaccine-- measles, mumps, rubella. You couldn't get them separately. So if they were going to go on protecting children against measles, for example, they had to buy the faulty mumps vaccine with it. And the judge said, "I don't care. Merck, get off." So they get off. So if the film had not been made, no one would ever know about this case. No one would ever know about their behavior. And that's the importance of film.

[00:33:23] Luke: Wow, that's unbelievable. Watching the film, the case is so cut and dried. It's so obvious. I know very little about law or medicine, and I'm just like, "Well." You just look at the facts. It's like, look at the evidence that's being submitted. A 5-year-old could tell you who's going to win that case. That's just insane.

[00:33:46] I saw today on Twitter, and I feel like it was relatively fresh news that the FDA had approved the COVID vaccine, one of them-- I forget who it was-- for six-month-old children to 11 this week. It's absolutely insane that they get away with this. I'm not overstating this, but from my perspective, we're in the middle of a genocide, and people are just oblivious. It's crazy to me.

[00:34:25] Andy: It's irrelevant whether it's beneficial or not to children in that age group. It doesn't matter. They don't care. If it's on the recommended schedule, then the drug companies have no liability. Those are the criteria. That's it. And so they want a situation where they have no liability. So they're going to put children at risk, get it on to the CDC recommended schedule, no liability for death or damage caused by the COVID vaccine, which we know is huge.

[00:34:55] The evidence is insurmountable of death and injury as a consequence, severe injury as a consequence of this vaccine. And children are at pretty much zero risk of mortality following COVID infection itself. So what is going on?

[00:35:14] Luke: I like to think of myself as a pretty positive, upbeat person. The glass is half full all the time. I've been working on that for a long time. But when it comes to seeing news like that, it's like I have a hard time accepting that it's only about profit. Because it's so diabolical and evil.

[00:35:42] It's like, if I went a step above, it's just profit shareholders. They don't care. They just want to pump out more money. You could include in that, that, well, if you make someone terminally ill for life, that's a pharmaceutical cash cow. Every person that you make sick is going to be paying you for the rest of their lives as long as they live.

[00:36:04] But with the number of vaccines that kids are given on the recommended schedule, and them adding this mRNA-- I don't even want to call it a vaccine, shot, it's more of mass death thing. And what would be the motive of that population control? And maybe there's a financial incentive or a control incentive, if there are fewer people on the planet, they're easier to control just by numbers.

[00:36:35] It's seems more diabolical than I can even conceive. And it seems to me that it's about more than money. There's something even darker at play. After you have been involved in this and observing this for so long, how dark do you think it is?

[00:36:52] Andy: Yeah. This is a question that I wanted to put to them for a very, very long time, but they're shielded from this kind of question. I don't know the answer. It's perplexing. It is just as you say, is it just money? Money, sure. There's a lot to be made. But doing so in the certain knowledge that it's causing harm to children, it's quite staggering, and it is evil.

[00:37:26] Whether it's done to depopulate the world or not, that's the net consequence of it. Because people are dying in large numbers from COVID vaccine. The excess mortality associated with exposure, particularly to more doses of that vaccine is glaringly obvious. So with that knowledge, how can it be that you're allowed to go on doing this?

[00:37:56] And the problem is also that the old vaccines, the old-style, live-attenuated vaccines like measles, mumps, and rubella, they've stopped working effectively. They do not work anywhere near as well as is required for a variety of reasons. And so the future for those is going to be mRNA-based measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine because there's no alternative.

[00:38:24] And so the dilemma here is they've got to keep the credibility, the profile of these mRNA vaccines up in order to subsequently launch mRNA-based vaccines for-- let's call it vaccines just for the sake of argument-- for diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella onto the market.

[00:38:51] Luke: So essentially their goal is to transition more and more of the vaccines into that particular format.

[00:38:58] Andy: That's my belief. Absolutely.

[00:38:59] Luke: Yeah. To play devil's advocate, let's just say it was all about the money. They could just produce vaccines that don't work, but don't kill you or make you sick. They could just make fake saline vaccines and make a bunch of money without maiming people. That's the part that gets me. It's like they seem to be engineered to harm people. Because they harm people so dramatically, and in many cases, instantly. I know two people extremely close to me that died as a result, I believe, of that COVID vaccine.

[00:39:39] Andy: Here's the other problem you have, is that if it turns out that the evidence is undeniable for COVID vaccine injury, serious injury, then it will be the final nail in the coffin of public confidence in the public health policy makers. They say, "Oh, you anti-vaccine." No.

[00:40:04] Vaccines are just an inert, innocuous substance sitting on a shelf in a fridge until your policy decides to put them into someone. The problem is the policymakers. What I am anti is not vaccine, but anti-vaccine policymaker because they're the ones who actually are the danger to the population.

[00:40:28] Now, if you cause the attrition of public confidence across the board in vaccines, because it turns out that the COVID vaccine, which was too big to fail, has failed and has done a lot of damage, then you compromise public confidence in vaccines for all time, for all vaccines. They've lost any credibility they have. So it's the biggest mistake they ever made, but it's become too big to fail. And that's another reason they're pushing so hard. It simply can't be allowed to be true.

[00:41:08] Luke: Do you think that in the past few years, there's a higher degree of vaccine awareness and hesitancy as a result of them pushing so hard with this last round?

[00:41:21] Andy: Absolutely. When I got involved in this originally in the early '90s, 1990s, there were a handful of people worldwide prepared to discuss this thorny issue of vaccine safety, and now it's more than half the adult population of the world. That's come about for a variety of reasons.

[00:41:44] One is the sheer volume, the sheer numbers of vaccine-injured children, autism being one example in my opinion. The second reason is film. Film has made a huge difference, huge in as much that you are able to, in the clinic, help one child at a time. You make a movie, and you can bring a story to millions of people at a time. So that changed. And then of course, COVID, which had a profound effect on people's perception of vaccine safety and the credibility of people like Tony Fauci and Peter Daszak and others.

[00:43:02] So they've been the architects of their own undoing. Absolutely no mistake about it. They can blame you and me for having this discussion or putting this message out there, but they are entirely to blame for the attrition of public confidence in their policymaking because they have done such a bad job, such a corrupt job.

[00:43:22] So there are many reasons for the change, but yes, now there are many, many, many more people rising up against this public health view of the world. And I can see that in the end, the public are going to lose. What are they going to do? Because in the end, you require public confidence in policy makers to follow their policies. And if they don't believe you anymore, particularly if you've harmed them or their children, then it's a bust.

[00:43:58] Luke: I think one of the positives over the past few years has been that they've pushed so hard, not just in the medical realm, but just in the authoritarian, march forward, that people on the periphery that were maybe just mining their own business, living their own lives, they've interfered with so many people's freedom on so many different levels that I think they've hopefully awakened the sleeping giant in the population where more and more people are starting to question.

[00:44:34] Even now, I think so many folks in this country were hopeful when Donald Trump won the election. All the promises that were made of holding corrupt politicians and pedophiles accountable and all these things. And it's like nothing's happening. He's totally reversed course, and I think that's waking up a lot of people on that side of the political spectrum.

[00:45:01] People are going, "Wait, what? This isn't what we voted for." Getting involved in these foreign wars and all the things that are going on. So it's like, to me, every time government makes promises that they don't keep and then reverse, it's like, it's a negative in the immediate, but probably in the long term, in terms of just being someone who's pro-human, it's probably a positive because they're going to lose that faith on so many levels.

[00:45:29] So it's like right now there might be more and more suffering as a result of what these pharmaceutical corporations are up to, but it's like every mistake they make just keeps waking more and more people up, hopefully. Think about like your film Vaxxed, which we'll put in the show notes also, again, at lukestorey.com/wakefield. To me, that's like the gold standard of vaccine film.

[00:45:53] Think about how many parents who were maybe just neutral on the issue watch that film and thought, eh, I don't think so. I'm going to move to another state where I don't have to get a vaccine to put my kid in school or whatever decisions they made.

[00:46:08] I think it's likely that many people have heard people like you on this podcast who maybe just were unaware of some of these issues and now go, "Eh, I'm going to do my own research and not just take my pediatrician's advice at face value." It's like little by little, every film, every podcast, everyone who has the courage to speak out is just one more chink in the armor of that machine.

[00:46:33] Andy: Vaxxed was extraordinary. Vaxxed had a huge impact, far more than we ever anticipated, and there were reasons for that. But one is that it was a whistleblower from the CDC telling the story, relating the story of the fraud in which he was a principal architect.

[00:46:56] It wasn't my opinion or Del Bigtree's opinion, my producer. It was coming directly from the mouth of a senior member of the CDC who designed a study to determine whether MMR vaccine was associated with autism. Proved that it was and then destroyed the documents and the data.

[00:47:14] And so that was one. It wasn't just a matter of talking heads, giving opinions. It was him telling the story of what actually happened with the documents, with the actual original documents that they fraudulently altered.

[00:47:27] Luke: It's pretty cut and dried, a good nail in the coffin. One more big nail.

[00:47:34] Andy: And the other was, and this is quite unexpected, fascinating, was that, as you probably know, it got into Tribeca Film Festival. And that's probably one of the preeminent film festivals in the world. One that we were very keen to get into. Not least of, which is Robert De Niro has a vaccine-injured son.

[00:47:54] And so he would relate to this particular story. We got into Tribeca, and then it was withdrawn short time later. It was censored. They came up with some cockamamie story about why it was censored. But it was censored. And then De Niro went on television with his partner in Tribeca, Jane Rosenthal, where they have a week of television talking about Tribeca Film Festival.

[00:48:27] The Good Morning America, the Today Show, this kind of thing. And he said, we shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have censored that film. We should have played it. We should have allowed people to make up their minds. And that blew up worldwide.

[00:48:39] Luke: remember that. Yeah.

[00:48:40] Andy: The De Niro effect was extraordinary. Censorship backfired on them in the biggest way.

[00:48:46] Luke: Yeah.

[00:48:47] Andy: And it gave that film profile that, if it had played at Tribeca, maybe 200 people would've seen it. Then suddenly it went global. It was an extraordinary. So they've gone rather quiet after that. When it comes to our films, their criticisms have been relatively muted because they don't want to have another situation like that.

[00:49:09] Luke: Yeah. The De Niro effect. I've heard people refer to that as the Streisand Effect. I forget where that term originates. But that's something I really enjoy when the system tries to shut down a truth, and however it's presented, they actually end up amplifying the message. It's like, well done, guys. Keep at it.

[00:49:30] Andy: Yeah.

[00:49:32] Luke: The thing about it is, I think it's in the human nature in our wisdom, if we're at all tapped into it, we wonder if someone is silenced, then why would they go through all that trouble to silence someone if they're just a nut? If you look at your Wikipedia page, which I would be very proud if that was my page, it's like the world's prominent anti-vaxxer. I was like, "Wow, what a title."

[00:49:57] Andy: A fraud and a child--

[00:49:59] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, why would someone go through the trouble if the person is just nuts? You would just leave them alone. You just write them off as a nutter. You wouldn't put any energy into trying to just discredit someone if nothing they're saying is credulous anyway.

[00:50:17] It's a funny thing that they haven't learned that by now. Maybe they have with your films. They're just hoping it just exists under the radar, and they know if they start opposing it, that they're just going to bring attention and energy to it and expose it to more people.

[00:50:32] Andy: Yeah. They know what's going on. The people at the top in the CDC know exactly what's going on. They know that vaccines and vaccine excipients, products of vaccines are causing autism. And it's a question of getting their bonus and getting out before it breaks on their watch.

[00:50:53] This is the kind of mentality. And it's, he's doing it, so I'll do it. This is the story my boss has told me to tell. That's the story I'm going to tell. There's this corporate immorality that operates. But they know the facts. And we were told by William Thompson, the CDC whistleblower, they know. It's a question of how long they can seek to cover it up, smooth over--

[00:51:27] Luke: Thing I don't understand, Andy, is how do these people sleep at night?

[00:51:31] Andy: I don't know.

[00:51:31] Luke: It's so strange to me. If I defrauded someone of a hundred dollars or something, it would ruin my life. You know what mean? I wasn't always that way much of my life. I think I lacked the morality and ethics that I have today, for sure. But never to that point where I would be knowingly willing to harm someone for personal gain and just be able to go home and play with my kids and live life like nothing happened.

[00:52:01] It's so strange to me. And I think one of our faults, is it's difficult for us, I think, as people to comprehend the degree of evil that many people in this world live by, because we can't put ourselves in their shoes. I can't imagine, as I just said, how do you sleep at night? Because I couldn't.

[00:52:26] So it gives me-- not me, but I think some of us have rose-colored glasses, like, oh, that can't be true. It can't really be that bad because people aren't that evil, because we can't imagine what it's like to be a sociopath or a psychopath. It's like you can't understand what motivates those people or how they live with themselves because you're not like them.

[00:52:47] I understand people that are like me. You generally care about other people and you want to do good. And if you harm someone, you feel guilty about it, so you don't do that anymore. You learn as you go. I think it's one of our weak spots as people that we can't address these things because we can't imagine that they're true, that it's really that bad.

[00:53:11] Andy: Yeah. People have a way of justifying their behaviors. For example, William Thompson, during the making of the film, and just afterwards, he wrote to my wife. He wrote to her saying, "If we'd been honest in what we did, we would've saved your husband's career." But then he said, "If I lost my job at the CDC, if I go on television, if I talk about this, if I tell the truth, my wife will divorce me."

[00:53:44] In other words, I can't tell the truth. I've got to stay silent because my wife will divorce me. So you displace the responsibility for your inaction, your a fraud onto someone else. The wife, she's going to divorce me if I tell this story. People have a way of diluting their own culpability in this way.

[00:54:05] He's doing it, so I can do it. It's what he's saying. And he's my boss. So it's what I'll say as well. And I'm so close to getting my pension and getting out of this damn place. I'll say nothing. That's the way people are. But these are questions I'd love to put to them. Why? What were you thinking?

[00:54:24] I know that I wouldn't get an answer from them. I certainly wouldn't get the truth. But people ask me all the time, why do they do it? I don't know. Because I'm not in their mind. That's not the way my mind works. Yeah.

[00:54:38] Luke: I know my own propensity for self-delusion and justification of making things okay that maybe my gut tells me really aren't okay. But that's on another level entirely. When you are indirectly or directly, in some cases, responsible for harming and killing tens of thousands or even millions of people, that's some serious karma.

[00:55:05] There's soldiers that go to war that don't do that much damage, and they're coming back with PTSD, trying to reconcile their actions. It's hard to imagine that someone could numb themselves to the reality of their actions and to be able to normalize it, just like, well, that's just how the industry works. I know it's not right, but as you said, everyone's doing. It's how the system's built, so I'm just going to go along with it. It's crazy, man. It's crazy.

[00:55:34] In terms of vaccines, the counter argument I hear from the few people that are still clinging to that, the idea that we need them and they're effective, which I personally, I would never, ever take any vaccine. If I had kids, I would never give any of them, pets, dogs. I just don't believe vaccines are worth a shit in general at all.

[00:55:58] In your research and experience, has there ever been a time where any vaccine was viable, useful? Because many people will point to polio. But then on the other side, they'll say, well, this is when hygiene and refrigeration happened at the same time when supposedly the polio vaccine came and those numbers went down.

[00:56:20] You see these graphs and it's hard to determine what's correlation versus causation because there were other big changes that happened at the same time that could be attributed to the decline in something like polio.

[00:56:33] Andy: We addressed this issue directly head on in a film called 1986: The Act. It was made about the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the one that exempted these guys from liability for death and injury caused by their products.

[00:56:49] And in that, it's a docudrama, and they're a husband and wife, and they're late in their reproductive career. She falls pregnant for the first time. They're going to have a baby. It's very precious to them. And they get onto the issue of vaccines. And she says, "I want to do a bit of research on this."

[00:57:08] And he says, "What about polio?" And walks out of the room. That's it. I've won the argument because I've said what about polio? Well, what about polio? And so the film explores that as the first issue that's raised. Because it's often the first thing that comes out of people's mouths. What about polio? And the problem with polio is the story is not at all what we've been told.

[00:57:31] We don't know what the truth is, but one example why the situation is somewhat confused is that after the introduction of the polio vaccine, they changed the definition of paralytic polio, and that had the effect of moving a lot of cases from a previous diagnosis of paralytic polio into non-polio associated paralytic disease.

[00:58:11] Luke: Ah, old sleight of hand.

[00:58:14] Andy: Exactly. It is statistical sleight of hand.

[00:58:16] Luke: Like the PCR test.

[00:58:18] Andy: Yeah. So we do not have the truth on polio. What the truth ultimately is, we don't know. But a vaccine and safety is the issue for me as a parent and as a professional. And since the vaccines, none of them have been through the gold standard for all pharmaceuticals, which is the long-term randomized control clinical trial. They haven't been through that. Then you cannot determine-- you cannot deem them to be safe. You can't do it because they haven't been through the appropriate trial.

[00:58:56] And it's never been done for vaccines. They've been let off the hook, and yet people say they're safe and effective without that necessary evidence. So no, I simply couldn't say that any of the vaccines that are on the childhood vaccine schedule at the moment have been through those tests and therefore can be deemed to be safe. So that's the situation in which we find ourselves right now.

[00:59:23] Luke: It's funny to me that people that are on the right in America, the Republicans, many of them worship Ronald Reagan and ignore the fact that the liability issue, house resolution, what was it, in 1986?

[00:59:45] Andy: Yeah, [Inaudible].

[00:59:46] Luke: Whatever the number was-- me either. But that happened on Reagan's watch, and he's held up by some as this real, all-American hero, freedom, liberty kind of thing. It's like, well, that was one of the most tragic errors in terms of legislation ever when it comes to medicine. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't be in the situation we're in, would we?

[01:00:08] Andy: I think what the problem is, is this, that politicians and certainly presidents are not scientists. They're not epidemiologists. They're not virologists. And so in something as complicated as this, they are entirely dependent on the information they're getting from their departmental heads, from the head of NIH, from Fauci, from others. They're entirely dependent on that.

[01:00:37] And the argument is if, and this was the argument originally by the pharmaceutical companies, we are making very little money out of the vaccine. At the time, the topical vaccine was the one of interest, was the pertussis, the whooping cough vaccine. We are making so little money out of this that if you don't take away liability from us, then we're going to stop making it, and children will die, and it'll be your fault. How do you feel about that?

[01:01:08] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[01:01:08] Andy: That was the arguments, is that we will get out of the market because our margins are very small. And if we have to pay for the damage that we know is being done to children, permanent neurological injury and death, then we're going to get out of the market, and it'll be your fault that children die.

[01:01:29] And so they held the feet of the government to the fire because the government was persuaded that vaccines were absolutely necessary, that they'd had these hugely beneficial effects on mortality and morbidity from infectious disease, and therefore, they were forced into a corner. There were two other elements to that bill, essentially.

[01:01:52] And one was that children who are injured, who are the soldiers on the battlefield who are wounded in the war on infectious disease should be compensated fairly and adequately. And the other is that research should be done to make vaccines safer. Well, those two, the latter two completely disappeared.

[01:02:15] The protection of the pharmaceutical industry against liability, that's been a godsend to them. So you're quite right. The consequence of that act was disastrous. But you can see how politicians who know nothing were manipulated into acting in the way that they did. So the industry is very, very devious and can be guaranteed to always operate in its own interest.

[01:02:48] Luke: Many people have debated whether or not Donald Trump was complicit with the Operation Warp Speed, or if he was manipulated in a similar way.

[01:02:59] Andy: Exactly the same way. He would've been told by Fauci and a whole cadre of people behind Fauci how absolutely essential and groundbreaking and safe this was. I can almost write the script of how it would have been.

[01:03:16] Luke: It probably will be in a future script that you write.

[01:03:18] Andy: Yeah. And that's unfortunately the susceptibility of politicians to the influence of people with a vested interest.

[01:03:30] Luke: Thing that's been interesting about that particular case to me is that he's had no accountability or even acknowledgement of what a catastrophe that's been. I've only seen the guy, and I have no horse in any political race. I don't believe in politics or governments in general. Anyway, that's a whole other story.

[01:03:59] But I've only seen Mr. Trump brag about Operation Warp Speed and just completely ignore the fact that so many people have been harmed or killed as a direct result of his participation, whether or not he was complicit. It's like, well. Maybe that would be career suicide for him, even if he knows like, oh man, I messed up. I was manipulated. I shouldn't have gone along with this. But I know--

[01:04:27] Andy: I don't think so. I think if he were honest, if let's say Bobby Kennedy goes to him and says, "Look, here is the evidence. I'm going to set it out for you line by line by line," for what actually happened and he realized that he'd been duped, I think that probably more than any other president in my lifetime, he might well come forward and say, "Yeah, this was not a good thing. I could have done better."

[01:04:54] Luke: I agree 100%. People are forgiving, but only to the point that people are willing to take responsibility. So I think a lot of people have been watching and waiting. Hmm, is he ever going to mention this? Doesn't look like it. Bobby is someone I spent a bit of time with. He's been on the podcast. He was on in 2020.

[01:05:16] And I think, like you, is someone who's been really on the front lines of this issue and been really brave. And the cost that he's paid personally and professionally, I'm sure, is not even quantifiable. And so myself and so many of us were hopeful that if he was able to get into this administration, that he might be able to do some good.

[01:05:38] And my experience of him is limited. We're not super close. But I've spent a few hours with him here and there. I'm, I think, a pretty good judge of character. And I have experienced him as being someone who's obviously very intelligent, driven. He's energized. I believe he really has his heart in what he does. And he seemed like a guy that was very authentic and integrous to me.

[01:06:05] And so I wonder to what degree his hands are tied, because many people have been critical. Like just today, people are blaming Bobby Kennedy for this recent FDA approval of the COVID vaccine for children. Bobby, F you. Bobby, F you. And it's hard for me to think that he's been compromised.

[01:06:27] It's like, has he been compromised or are his hands tied and there's only so much he can do in his position? Or does it just take time in his position to get anything done? You have one man essentially that's going up against a freaking army that is so entrenched for so many years. I think people have unrealistic expectations perhaps on what is actually possible when you're Goliath going up against the beast.

[01:06:53] Andy: I think you've hit the nail on the head. One is that he's one man in a Congress where virtually every single member of the Senate and the House is funded by the pharmaceutical industry in their campaign funds. That is a huge hill to have to climb to back all of those people and convince them that what you are doing is right.

[01:07:19] I think the other thing is that you mentioned quite rightly is that it took a long time to get here. The pieces of this wall have been put in place over a very, very long period by a lot of people. To anticipate that it would change in a very short space of time is unrealistic. I think a lot is going to depend upon the outcome of his studies that he's doing on comparison of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

[01:07:50] That's going to be the absolute key. It's what the CDC and others fear. They've been hiding the Vaccine Safety Datalink database, a public database. They've been hiding it from the public forever to stop them getting access to it, to stop them studying it because they know what the results are.

[01:08:09] And when that comes out, it's going to have a devastating impact on public perception of vaccine safety. And they've got to do everything they can to prevent it coming out. And so that's going to be a key moment for if he gets that study out, gets it published, then he can change the minds of a lot of people and make the next step for him very much easier.

[01:08:42] Luke: Yeah. That's a very broad approach. Let's look at population A, population B over time, the health outcomes in general. Anyone with half a brain can look at the health of our children today and say, "Wow, we're getting worse, not better, objectively."

[01:09:00] Andy: And the question is, are those children who are getting worse the ones who've received all the vaccines or the children who've received none? And intuitively, we know the studies that have been done so far, at least, come very close to answering that question.

[01:09:15] In many cases, showing that fully vaccinated children fare far less well in the areas of cognitive disorders, autism, ADD, ADHD, asthma, eczema, hay fever, all of these things, allergic rhinitis. One can anticipate that the results of the bigger study are going to be somewhat similar.

[01:09:41] Luke: Are you optimistic about that getting out?

[01:09:46] Andy: I would like to see it come. It is what it is. If science is done properly and the result is believable, then the answer lies in the data. It's not that I want one thing or another. What I want is the truth. And if the truth is that vaccines are causing these problems, are causally associated with these problems, then we need to know that. If they're not and it's something else, we need to know that too.

[01:10:13] So one has to stand back from subjectivity of this is the outcome I anticipate and want because it'll prove what I believe. No. What you've got to do is say, let's get the answer out of the data and move from that point.

[01:10:31] Luke: In terms of the relationship between vaccines and autism internationally, how do other countries differ in terms of public perception in contrast to the United States?

[01:10:48] Andy: It's identical. For example, if you go to the UK, then the prevalence of autism is identical to that here. That's interesting because a lot of people have put forward the idea that the mercury in vaccines, the preservative is responsible for the neurodevelopmental injury in children.

[01:11:12] So it's not the target antigen itself, like pertussis or whatever it may be, but it's the mercury in the vaccines. What's interesting, and that's entirely biologically plausible, and there is evidence for it in America, but Europe and the UK have never used thimerosal in vaccines, and yet the prevalence of the disorder in children is at the same level.

[01:11:38] Luke: Really?

[01:11:39] Andy: So that's an interesting question that needs to be addressed. So is it something else? Is it the aluminum in vaccines, the adjuvant? Is it the vaccine itself? And the story that I heard originally was from parents was MMR. And children received their MMR in isolation at that time in England, and so the parents could pinpoint what they believed to be the core.

[01:12:06] Is it likely that there's a compound effect between MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines? I believe that's entirely plausible. Thimerosal damages the immune system. And if your immune system is damaged and you're given a triple live viral vaccine, do you handle it differently than if your immune system is operating normally? All of these are entirely reasonable questions that we need to answer.

[01:12:36] Luke: That's the thing with counter indications in medication, right? When these studies are done even if they're done properly and honestly, they're done in isolation. Give person one drug, see what happens. Not give a kid 86 shots in the first few months, three years of their lives, and see what happens when you mix all of that together. It's like a time bomb gumbo of God knows what it's going into these kids. Yeah, it'd probably be impossible at this point to determine which thing is doing what exactly.

[01:13:10] Andy: You could never do it. You could never, ever do it. It's become, as you say, far too complex. All you can really do sensibly is to compare fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated. And the problem with that is they've made it very complicated because there are so many vaccines.

[01:13:29] But if it turns out that children who are fully vaccinated are systematically worse or unhealthier than the unvaccinated, you've compromised confidence in all the vaccines across the board because you can't discern which one or which combination is responsible. So everything's gone out the window. And they've created this problem. Because they never did the studies in the first place, they have created this dilemma.

[01:13:59] Luke: Do you think we'll ever see real justice for the main perpetrators, the Faucis and Bourlas and these characters that especially have been at the helm of the COVID vaccines?

[01:14:17] Andy: No, I don't. There's very little accountability in the system, and I don't think that will ever happen, sadly. Yeah.

[01:14:28] Luke: Do you think this will be corrected, at least to whatever degree it can be corrected? Just through the growth of public awareness over time from people hearing conversations like this, watching films like yours that just more and more people will be opting out and asking questions, and that eventually over time, it will just deflate the beast and take its power away by just more public awareness and more knowledge?

[01:15:04] Andy: Yes. I've seen these mass action effect that the inevitably so many people are injured, so many people become aware that people change their minds about things. Almost saying this with COVID shots now, people are rejecting the government policy on recommended vaccines and booster doses.

[01:15:24] Again, I think it's inevitable, and it's certainly at their doorstep. It's the one thing that they are responsible. Another thing that they're responsible for is this declining public confidence in their decision making? I think it will happen. The sooner it happens, the better.

[01:15:44] Luke: Now, I know you haven't been working clinically for a long time. Are you tapped into any experts on the front lines in terms of helping parents that are dealing with autistic kids and things like that? Are there any forerunners in that realm on the clinical side that you've seen doing interesting and novel?

[01:16:11] Andy: Since I got involved in filmmaking, less and less. So I occasionally get people calling me from Australia for example, or elsewhere asking if I can help, and the only thing I can do to help is pass them on to an organization that is in touch with the doctors who are on the front line of this. That's not me.

[01:16:32] There are more knowledgeable people and better people to do it now. Things have moved on. And there is more awareness that this is reversible and treatable. And so those people are out there. Unfortunately, I haven't been in touch with them.

[01:16:51] Luke: You've chosen a bigger battle or a different battle.

[01:16:54] Andy: A different battle.

[01:16:55] Luke: Yeah. That's the one lingering question, of course, from parents, is like, okay, we see what the problem is. Many people, I'm sure, feel guilty and extremely regretful that they didn't know, that they learned too late, and now they've got a vaccine-injured child. But the question was like, oh, what can we do about it? And it seems, in the early days it was, as you said, get rid of the milk products and gluten and things like that.

[01:17:24] And I've seen things advance, but unfortunately I haven't come into contact with anyone that has the ultimate solution. There's people working with lasers and doing more of the functional neurology. And there's a lot of things I see in the periphery, but we don't seem that we've gotten to the point where we have a standardized protocol that works for every kid. It seems pretty hit or miss at this point, which is really unfortunate.

[01:17:52] Andy: It may well be out there. Those protocols may be out there. I'm just not aware of them. So don't stop looking just because I'm not aware.

[01:17:58] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:18:00] Andy: The other thing I wanted to mention is that you mentioned about dealing currently with the bigger picture. There's one big element of this that's missing and something I just wanted to mention, and that is what about the children who are already injured?

[01:18:13] We've now got millions of children who are entirely dependent on the system for their care and wellbeing, particularly when their parents become infirm or die. And this is one of the biggest problems that I've encountered in the clinic that has really haunted me ever since, is the pervasive question in so many parents, is what happens to my child, my autistic child when I become infirm or die, when I'm no longer there to look after them?

[01:18:51] How will they fare in a world that isn't prepared for this, doesn't have the funding to deal with it, doesn't have the understanding of their condition to deal with it appropriately, and doesn't love them? Are they going to die on the streets? Are they going to die lonely in a corner in some care side?

[01:19:12] And it haunts every parent of an affected child, and it has not been resolved to anything like the extent it should. And this is a global problem. It's not just the United States. And so the next film I'm making is a story about justice, and it's actually set in, oh, it's a Western.

[01:19:39] Luke: Really?

[01:19:39] Andy: It's a Western, yeah. It's not a vaccine story, but it raises this critical issue of how do we care for these adults, affected adults going forward? And so that's the next movie. And so if there's anyone out there who wants to join in, get involved, please do so. Yeah, I'd love to hear from you. info@wakefieldmediagroup.com.

[01:20:14] Luke: info@wakefieldmedia.com. We'll put that in the show notes too. Yeah.

[01:20:18] Andy: Is it media group, or? wakefieldmediagroup.

[01:20:20] Luke: Wakefieldmediagroup.com. All right. We'll link that in the show notes. God, that's a terrifying prospect to even consider. If you think about what happened when they shut down the mental hospitals in the '80s, and just turned so many mentally challenged, mentally ill people and addicts onto the street, I remember when I was a little kid, even if you went to a major city, there were a few homeless people, disenfranchised people.

[01:20:58] But there weren't just streets and entire neighborhoods filled with truly mentally ill people that have serious psychiatric problems like you'll find in any major city now. So it's hard to imagine what it will look like in 25, 30, 50 years from now when the 1 in 10 children right now that are dependent on their caregivers are going to be basically left to fend for themselves.

[01:21:23] It's like zombie apocalypse vision that comes to mind. It's like that's a lot of people. 1 in 10? Then what is that in 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000, 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000, 1 in a million? That's a lot of people that are going to be out there without care.

[01:21:42] Andy: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:42] Luke: It's just terrifying to think about that.

[01:21:47] Andy: The message of hope that comes through this film.

[01:21:50] Luke: Good. I'm glad you asked, because I'm starting to think about the future. I go, how are we going to help all these people?

[01:21:57] Andy: It is fascinating. Years ago, when I first got involved, I remember meeting a severely affected nonverbal child in Northern California. We were by the pool at his family's home. I was brand new to autism. And his father said to him, would you like to go to Chuck E. Cheese? Now, he was nonverbal, but he-- I was watching this for the first time. He stopped. You know how sometimes when someone's asked you a question, you stop and think about it? He stopped. You could tell that he'd understood the question.

[01:22:35] The trouble is he had no way of communicating his answer to his father. He was nonverbal. So he found a way. And he found a way by going up, taking his father's arm, leading him to the garage, and off they went to Chuck E. Cheese. So he circumvented whatever hardwired problem there was to find the answer that he wanted to convey to his father.

[01:23:01] And I then met another child in Northern California who would write the most exquisite poetry. He would type it. But again, nonverbal, couldn't communicate any other way, but it was wonderful idiosyncratic poetry that only he could have written. But it was written off as fraud on the part of his caregiver who was doing it for him.

[01:23:22] No, she was smart enough, but this was so unique, and people did not see that. And it was baffling to me that people can see that. Since then, it's been discovered that children often with severe autism are nonverbal actually are remarkably talented, remarkably clever, but they do not have a way of communicating that in the normal way that you and I are doing now.

[01:23:51] They don't have a way. But then they learned. They realized this, and then people started to teach them to type. When they started to teach them to type, it became quite clear that these individuals are actually brilliant. They understood calculus. They could speak five languages. It was absolutely incredible.

[01:24:12] And there was a documentary called Spellers, which told the story of many children, but started with one child whose father had considered to his eternal shame, his perception of his-- to his shame, that his son was retarded, and he was mentally injured, and that was it. Then Kate had to come to terms with the fact that he had completely misread, completely misunderstood his child, underestimated him all these years.

[01:24:46] Son says, dad, don't worry. I understand. Don't worry. It's okay. And it then spread and spread, and it was a realization, what I'd seen all those years ago of they just don't have the ability to communicate in the way that we communicate. And their tests of cognitive function of mental retardation were based on verbal responses. We created these metrics that required verbal responses to people who didn't have verbal responses. Because that particular wiring in their brain was damaged. So ironically, it was we who needed to learn how to communicate, not them.

[01:25:34] Luke: Right. That's like testing the mental abilities of a blind person by trying to get them to describe what they see.

[01:25:44] Andy: That's exactly right. That exactly right. And so who was retarded in this?

[01:25:50] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:25:52] Andy: And that's the thing that comes through in this film. So there is that.

[01:26:00] Luke: This brings up an interesting point of some hope. I know sometimes many of the conversations I have with people like you probably leave people like, "Oh man, we're screwed." But going back to that, where are we going to be in 20 to 50 years?

[01:26:16] Hopefully by then more people will have realized what you just described, that just because someone-- and I'm not saying like we should keep vaccinating kids by any stretch, but for those that have already been injured, that that doesn't necessarily mean that they're any less capable mentally or any less intelligent.

[01:26:34] It is just, for some of them at least, in their ability to communicate verbally. So you think about braille and sign language. That's just common knowledge and accepted that people that have difficulty hearing and seeing still have something to say, and they can still be heard. They just need a different way of doing it. And I think this is really fascinating, especially in light-- I'm sure you've heard of, if not listened to, The Telepathy Tapes, this podcast. You heard of this?

[01:27:03] Andy: I haven't, no.

[01:27:04] Luke: Oh my God. Oh, dude. It's insane.

[01:27:07] Andy: In the setting of autism, yes, I have. Absolutely fascinating.

[01:27:12] Luke: Yeah. So many of these autistic kids, they're telepathic. They're doing the spelling as you described, and they're brilliant. And they're also communicating with one another over distances, this quantum telepathic communication. It's just absolutely fascinating, and it's being validated by psychiatrists, doctors, people that are scholarly and credible. It isn't just some hippies with wishful thinking, thinking their kid's talking to them from the other room. So many of these experiments now are being done to show that these kids actually have unique abilities.

[01:27:55] Andy: Telepathic. I remember the child looking at someone here, and behind the mother is pulling up a card. He can't see it, seven of clubs. And he was just saying what it was. Absolutely fascinating. And of course, people tried to dismiss it, the people doing the tests, and they found that it was entirely valid.

[01:28:15] I actually tried to get in touch with the girl who put those documentaries together. She didn't get back to me, which is sad. I think she may have probably have a perception of me as a human being, I don't know. But if she is out there, I'd love to communicate with her. It's such an interesting test that I can communicate.

[01:28:34] Luke: It's so fascinating. Yeah. I found that podcast. I think I listened to every episode in three days, which I was just blown away. It's just unreal. And also, just to the point of our earlier topic, there's an air of hope in that for the kids that already have been affected. To that end, I shared that podcast with the two friends who have autistic kids, and they were of course, already aware of it.

[01:29:01] And one of them was a little resentful of that, that body of work because she felt that it was normalizing autism. That it wasn't speaking to the causes so much as like, well, this is just the way it is. But isn't this neat that these kids have these abilities? That was kind of her perspective.

[01:29:27] But this is also someone who's really suffered a lot as a result of having a kid with autism. So I'm sure it's more difficult for someone who's been traumatized by the experience to go, "Yay, this is cool." It's like, yeah, that's great. Why don't we stop what's causing it? So I can see both sides of that. But wouldn't it be interesting if consciousness as it evolves through us humans takes something that's objectively wrong or even evil and turns it into something beautiful in a way?

[01:30:05] Andy: It would be absolutely extraordinary. It would be a quantum leap in our understanding of communication between humans. It would be revolutionary. And I think because the science doesn't understand, it doesn't have an explanation for it, it tends to reject it. This is what the [Inaudible] and autism would do and have done forever. I'm so clever that if this were the case, I would've followed it, and I didn't. That's the thinking.

[01:30:36] The vanity of medicine is staggering. Rather than saying, wow, that's absolutely fascinating, let's put it to the test. Let's put it through rigorous scientific inquiry. And if it turns out to be true, then we have to completely change our perception of how people communicate.

[01:30:57] Luke: Yeah. And our perception of reality as a whole. We get impressed that-- people refer to this all the time. You're thinking of someone, and then they call you, that kind of thing. We've all experienced that. And sometimes even more obvious demonstrations of the interconnectedness of all things.

[01:31:15] But these kids, these autistic kids that are showing these abilities, that's truly is a quantum leaf in terms of what's possible. It's just crazy. That could just upend so much of what we believe on so many different levels.

[01:31:32] Andy: Yeah.

[01:31:33] Luke: So I'm kind hopeful that that research will continue because that's the way I live my life and I'm not even aware of my capacity for that. But I'm always leaning into that, trying to fine tune my intuition, and all of that. And just remember that there truly is no separation. That it's an illusion because we happen to be in a body, and the body needs there to be a me and a you, and a there and a there, and an up and a down. This duality world that we live in. All of that flies in the face because that really is a more broad way of experiencing life.

[01:32:15] Andy: Yeah.

[01:32:15] Luke: Yeah.

[01:32:16] Andy: It's very interesting. It came home to me once. I was in Southern Spain on holiday, on vacation with my family. Had four small children, and my son, Sam, the second one had a fever. He was up in bed, and we were up in his room. And my wife, my ex-wife was mopping his brow, cooling him down, and we were all up there apart from one.

[01:32:44] Suddenly, my wife stopped. No reason, didn't say anything, sprinted across the room, down the stairs, across the kitchen, across the courtyard, across the second courtyard, into the pool area, and dived into the pool. Just dived straight into the pool to save my baby daughter who was taking her final step down into the pool, where she would've drowned. Beyond question, she would've drowned.

[01:33:13] Luke: Whoa.

[01:33:14] Andy: And we're all looking, wow, what just happened? How did she know? She just knew. There was no explanation. She knew exactly what was happening, what the danger was, and it was literally to the split second that she-- now, that's fascinating. You talk about interconnectedness, the connectivity theory and that everything in the universe is interconnected.

[01:33:40] But you can imagine a situation where that a mother and a child were once one. They all once one body. And I believe that that link is inextricable. It doesn't change. It's still there. And this is what we interpret as a mother's intuition. But she knows. Men don't have that same level of intuition because they weren't on body at a critical time. They have it, but not to the same extent as my belief. That's what I've seen.

[01:34:13] Luke: Yeah. As someone with a very intuitive wife, I would agree. I lean on her intuition, on things.

[01:34:21] Andy: We do. And we should appreciate in mothers of our children. We should recognize it and appreciate it because it's very real. And it's a very, very powerful force. And simply because we don't understand the mechanism by which it operates, that's a good reason to look at it, rather than to run away from it and say, oh no. That's not in the textbooks.

[01:34:42] Luke: That's an incredible story. How cool. I've experienced that in a less impressive way with our dog, Cookie, there. My wife has this innate knowing of what's going on with her. If she's getting into something, my wife would be like-- we'll be talking. She goes, "Where's Cookie?" And sure enough, she's getting into the trash or something in that moment. Or if she has to go outside to go potty, it's like she'll just know. If she needs to eat.

[01:35:11] It's really interesting to watch. Even though she didn't obviously give birth to the dog, that the motherly instinct is still very much active, and she's aware of things that I would never even think about. It's just like, I would've no idea. The dog could be falling off a cliff, and I wouldn't know. And she'll go, hmm, I need to check on the dog. It's like, how did you know that? It's pretty much like, I would say 100%, but her track record of being correct is quite impressive. Yeah.

[01:35:43] Andy: Right. Fascinating.

[01:35:43] Luke: Yeah. So you told us a bit about your next film. Wat else do you have going on in the future? What are your dreams, goals? If you could take your filmmaking as far as it could possibly go, what would you like to do with it?

[01:35:58] Andy: Our last movie won 34 Film awards, Protocol-7. That's not what I'm in it for. It was interesting. It was dangerously close to being respectable, which is somewhere I'm not familiar with. But I'd like to continue telling these extraordinary stories until I'm as old as Clint Eastwood. And hopefully I can do it as well as he can.

[01:36:29] Luke: Did you run into any censorship issues with Protocol-7? Because as I'm watching it on Amazon, I'm like, how did they let this guy put this film on?

[01:36:41] Andy: How did they let us? Because we had lawyers look over it in great detail, and we presented them with the factual evidence to the answers that they posed to us. They said, "Okay, fair enough." And we were entitled to believe based upon what we had available, that this was the case. As I say, it actually turned out to be somewhat muted film in terms of what they really did.

[01:37:07] But yeah, there's always that chance that they're just going to sue you because they can, because they're big enough to do it, irrespective of the merits of the case. But that didn't happen.

[01:37:19] Luke: It's incredible. It might have something to do too with just public awareness, public demand. There's got to be a bottom line at Amazon too, where they're just looking at something objectively, is this marketable or not?

[01:37:35] Andy: We've been censored left, right, and center. People turned up for a movie, a screening of a movie in Miami, and they started screening another movie, an entirely different or horror film.

[01:37:48] Luke: No way.

[01:37:49] Andy: Yeah. There are ways that they have of putting pressure on the system, persuading people not to play our movies. And fortunately, we have streaming services, which are taking them, and they're doing well there.

[01:38:06] Luke: At what point did you become desensitized to personal attacks? Was there a hurdle in terms of you'd worked so hard, you'd gone to school, you'd established credibility, a reputation, a career, and then you're treated like a monster simply for just telling the truth in the face of corruption? Was there a period where that was difficult for you emotionally?

[01:38:34] Andy: Oh yeah, yeah. I won't deny, it was for a very long time. It was dark, and it changed for me. I was down in Bandera, down in the Badlands, Southwest Texas, and I was outside. There was no ambient light. It was middle of the night, no moon.

[01:38:57] And there were just millions and millions and billions, billions of stars. And I looked up at the universe and I thought, you know what? The universe really doesn't care much about what happens to Andy Wakefield. It's got a lot more things on its mind. It's got a lot more important things on its mind.

[01:39:18] This isn't about you. Get over yourself. This is not about me. This is about something far more important, which is obviously the health and wellbeing of the future of this country and the world. And so you have all four limbs. You have the ability to speak, to communicate. These children don't. So get on with it. Get on with it, and be that voice, because this is not about you. Coming to that realization was life changing in many ways. It just lifted this huge burden off my shoulders and allowed me to get on with it. Now I am--

[01:40:00] Luke: You're desensitized to it.

[01:40:02] Andy: Now I look at it as a positive thing, when they censor it or say just--

[01:40:06] Luke: Like I said, when I look at your Wikipedia, I think, wow, that's very complimentary. It's like, that's my kind of guy. It's funny you mention that looking up at the stars and having that sense that what other people think of me or my little mellow dramas aren't that important. I had that exact-- I'm sure billions of humans have looked at the stars and went, wow, okay. I'm insignificant.

[01:40:25] But the very first time I took LSD when I was 16, just not a very pleasant time, generally speaking, because of the recklessness, with which I did it. But there was a moment I was standing out on my friend's porch, and I looked up the sky, had that same thing, but just amplified by that particular substance.

[01:40:47] And I realized like, wow, God, I'm so insignificant. And there was so much peace in that. Just going, oh man, I'm just so self-consumed all the time, thinking about me and my problems and what people think of me and how they perceive me, and if they judge me and all that, especially as a teenager when you're really sensitive to other people's opinions and you want to be approved of and all that. And it was so liberating. It really had a major impact on me. Just that five minutes of just going like, oh God, I'm really not that important. I got to stop--

[01:41:21] Andy: You do. When you realize how insignificant you are, it's liberating. You feel, ah, I feel so much better.

[01:41:29] Luke: It is. There is a paradox in that. That that can be empowering to realize that you mean much less than you think you do. It's actually really, really empowering. It's like a more authentic self-worth, that maybe there's just less of egotism or pride in that. I guess there's a power in humility when you're humbled by nature, and odd by nature, or by life experiences that are challenging. I think it does make you stronger in strange ways.

[01:42:01] Well, man, this has been an amazing conversation. You've been someone I've wanted to talk to for years. I was so excited to see y'all sitting in my living room when I jumped out of the sauna, which is embarrassing.

[01:42:11] Andy: No, not at all. Not at all.

[01:42:12] Luke: I thought I could sneak one in before you guys got here, and I'm like, "Hey, this is sweaty Luke. Nice to meet you.

[01:42:18] Andy: No problem. I forgot to show you the--

[01:42:19] Luke: Oh no. Let's see what that is. Is that relevant? He's got a graph in front of him that we were going to share.

[01:42:25] Andy: Yeah, I was going to send this to you.

[01:42:27] Luke: Tell us what's in the graph, and we'll put it in the show notes.

[01:42:30] Andy: This is a graph, and I'll just hold it up so you can cut to it whenever you want.

[01:42:35] Luke: Okay.

[01:42:36] Andy: And this deals with the issue of what is measles and how serious is measles. And it looks at it in an historical context. It's very important, and I doubt many of your listeners, your viewers have seen this before, but I want to show you this. And this is a mortality curve.

[01:42:59] The mortality in children under 16 from measles over the last 150 years. Now what you see here is that up until 1920 in the UK, the graph is identical for the United States and will be identical for other developed countries. Up until 1920, measles killed 1,200 per million children during epidemics. It was a major killer of children. Beyond that, there was this precipitous fall in case fatality rate. The vaccine came in up here.

[01:43:34] Luke: I love these graphs.

[01:43:35] Andy: None of this decline in mortality had anything to do with the vaccine. This decline in mortality meant since mortality is a proxy for how severe the disease is, measles was becoming rapidly and dramatically a less and less severe disease with time. Very, very quickly.

[01:44:00] The question for scientists should be, well, what would've happened to that curve if we'd done nothing, we'd not interfered with measles by introducing measles vaccine? Very likely it would've continued to zero or approaching zero. There would've been no deaths. Measles would've been a very, very mild disease. Man and measles were coming to terms with each other.

[01:44:24] And this is what happens with infectious disease. Happened too with COVID. A successful parasite like measles does not succeed if it kills its host. It succeeds if it doesn't kill its host and that host can spread the infection to other people, then the virus thrives. So it doesn't pay them to kill their host.

[01:44:49] And that's what we're seeing in large part. Now, this is due to viral factors, due to human factors, due to socioeconomic factors. Children were surviving because their health, the water they were drinking was cleaner. There are many factors that played into this, but this is natural herd immunity.

[01:45:09] And it's absolutely an exquisite representation of what natural herd immunity is, how powerful it is, and how insignificant in the declining mortality the vaccine actually was. They don't show you this graph because they don't really want you to see it or understand it. But I show it to you because it gives us a starting point for dealing with, well, what happens next?

[01:45:38] What do we do now? Are we all going to be killed off by measles because it's a terribly dangerous disease, which is effectively what the public health people are telling us. The history of measles tells us something very, very different. I just wanted to share that with you.

[01:45:55] Luke: I'm glad he did. I'm a very visual learner, so like I said earlier, looking at the Polio graph, there's this downturn, and then a couple of decades later, the vaccine's introduced, and the success of the vaccine is attributed to the decline, but the decline already happened. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to just understand that on a fundamental level, that the causation is being attributed to what is actually a correlation that's remotely related at best. That's awesome. Thank you for bringing that.

[01:46:30] Andy: Pleasure.

[01:46:31] Luke: All right, man. Thank you so much for coming by today. I appreciate it.