Kids, COVID & Costly Mistakes: Dr. Elizabeth Mumper on What Must Never Happen Again

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00:00–01:28 — Introduction; Dr Mumper returns; overview of her new book.

01:29–03:27 — Why she wrote Kids and COVID; concerns about untested technology.

03:27–06:45 — Vaccine marketing vs evidence; rushed trials; ethical concerns.

06:45–08:56 — Pharma influence; pressure on practitioners.

08:56–12:53 — Actual COVID risk to children; consequences of lockdowns.

12:53–17:19 — Death statistics; media fear; psychological harm in teens.

17:19–22:34 — RFK Jr., chronic illness, vaccine debates, CDC updates.

22:34–24:22 — Failures in U.S. healthcare system; reputations vs outcomes.

24:22–30:36 — Childhood vaccine schedule; lack of informed consent; 1986 liability act.

30:36–32:36 — Short follow-up periods; waning protection; immune suppression.

32:36–35:01 — Myocarditis in young men; 12x increased risk.

35:01–38:25 — VAERS limitations; underreporting; narrow compensation criteria.

38:25–42:52 — Institute of Medicine shortcomings; ignored evidence.

42:52–46:03 — Exploding chronic illness; call for mechanistic research.

46:03–48:48 — What must change: school closures, trials, socioeconomic fallout.

48:48–52:17 — Practical parent advice: innate immunity, nutrition, dirt exposure.

52:17–54:05 — Closing remarks; MIND Forum; book links.

Kids, COVID & Costly Mistakes: Dr. Elizabeth Mumper on What Must Never Happen Again

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:00)

Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Well, today I have the great pleasure of welcoming back one of the world’s leading pediatricians, Dr. Elizabeth Mumper. Now, Liz has for over four decades, clinical experience and a special focus on children with neurodevelopmental issues and complex chronic condition, things like autism and ADHD. while COVID may be a distant memory for some, it was life changing for many.

And children were and are the canaries in the coal mine. So Liz has also been on the front line of children’s health throughout this COVID era. And her new book, Kids and COVID, Costly Mistakes That Must Never Happen Again, takes a hard and importantly evidence-based look at how pandemic policies impacted on our children. And it’s very sobering lesson and it’s a very sobering story.

And what must be done differently next time. Look, this is a great conversation. I love having guests like Liz back on to talk to us and give us an update on what is the latest out there in the world of children’s health, which is a great indicator for our general health in particular. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Liz Mumper. Welcome back, Liz.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (01:29)

Thank you, Ron. I’m so glad to be here.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (01:30)

Liz, we spoke last time and it was an amazing podcast. I’d recommend people go back and listen to it again but today we’re talking about your new book. You’ve dedicated I know over 40 years in pediatrics. What made you realize you had to write a book like Kids and COVID and what was the key message you wanted parents and clinicians to grasp that just wasn’t being discussed?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (01:54)

Well, I was very worried from the very beginning that the technology that was being proposed to be given to children had not been tested before and that it was being ramped up very quickly and coming out without adequate safety trials. And especially when I looked at the pediatric trials and saw how relatively few people were in the trials and how there were significant side effects in some of those participants.

I felt it was important to get the word out so that if something like this happens again, people won’t be so susceptible to the messaging that came down from government officials and the pharmaceutical industry. I tried to mobilize parents’ inherent sense of instinct and gut feelings about what might be good for their child and make them aware of how what is called marketing, really is following the same principles as propaganda was used in this particular so-called pandemic to motivate people to line up to take this shot that wasn’t really a vaccine. It was a gene technology and that wasn’t made clear to people. So I felt like they had not gotten true informed consent.

And I think that they need to understand so that if something similar happens again, they’ll be better prepared.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (03:27)

But I mean, this opens up a whole can of worms about healthcare in general, doesn’t it? Because I know I did a podcast very early on with a professor of pediatrics in Australia, Professor Robert Boyd, who advises governments about vaccines. And I said to him, how can you justify using an experimental technology on my grandchildren? This was very personal when they’re low risk and we don’t even know about the technology, how can you justify that? And this is his response almost verbatim. 

How will we know it works if we don’t try it? And we talk about, I mean that’s just mind-boggling to hear somebody in that position say something like that. But you know, the other thing is that you say about the public, most health practitioners believe they are practic… evidence-based medicine. In fact they are practicing evidence-based marketing and it’s very difficult to tell the difference isn’t it?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (04:34)

Yeah, and he’s not the only one that has said similar things to that. That is something that vaccinologists say. And I think that there’s a complex psychological dynamic to this that if you are very invested in something you’ve invented and you’ve dedicated your life to making vaccines because you, you know, hopefully want to save mankind or.

Alternatively, you’re motivated by a big profit that’s to be had. But let’s just assume for the moment that it’s the former. You get very invested in it. It’s almost like the vaccine is your baby. And you are going to be resistant to people telling you it doesn’t work or you shouldn’t do it because you’ve invested a lot of brain power, money, and time in working on it.

Now with COVID, it was a little bit different because the timeline was extremely truncated. And the way that they did the trials was that they looked at very healthy adults and tried to exclude anybody with a chronic illness and they excluded women who were pregnant. And yet they rolled out the vaccine to the whole population. And as you know, here in America, we’re about the unhealthiest population in the world. You in Australia do better. But nonetheless, it was being given to people that weren’t included in the trials. And I thought that was basically very unethical. And I would argue that if he wants to find out that it works, you do a bigger trial in people that are consenting to being in a trial. 

You don’t just give it to the whole population especially if they were mandated to take it because then they don’t have a choice and they’re not giving informed consent to being part of this grand experiment. So I fundamentally disagree with that kind of logic. And yet I honestly am not that surprised that that was the answer because I’ve heard it many times before from other vaccinologists.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (06:45)

I would add ego and reputation as being a major driver in not being opened to alternate views. I think many health practitioners who are in busy practices seeing 30-40 patients a day, 10-15 minute appointments get the vast majority of their education cutting edge, I’m putting that in inverted commas, education from the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (07:14)

It is true that pharmaceutical representatives have really penetrated not only physician offices, but medical education. And the American Medical Association has tried to make some strides against that and, you know, put in some guidelines. You know, we know that when pharma comes around with a free lunch or even something as small as a pen, there’s a psychological strategy that it then makes us indebted to them.

And therefore were supposed to feel more inclined to use their products. And in America, they can track and see what products we write for. In my practice, when a pharmaceutical rep would come around, he or she would know exactly how many prescriptions for his or her drug I either had written or that I wasn’t writing for. And they can use that to try to put pressure on us.

Many physicians now are just saying that they’re not going to have pharmaceutical reps come into their offices. And that is, I think, a reasonable attempt to try to cut down on that kind of influence.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (06:45)

Because I think that when you knee deep in busy practice, it’s a story that’s very easy to miss but once you hear it, very difficult to ignore. But back to your book because in it you compare the relatively low risk of COVID presented to most healthy children and the harsh measures that were imposed on them such as school closures, masks, social distancing and a lot more. Looking back, where do you believe the greatest mismatches were between the real risk for kids and the policies they faced.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (08:56)

Well, the risk was almost zero for death from COVID. Somewhere between 1 in 1.7 and 1 in 2.5 million children died with COVID and not necessarily from COVID. And the deaths that we’re seeing around the world typically were in children that had significant comorbid conditions like leukemia, for example, or other cancers or chronic diabetes. So, they really were not at risk and the vast majority of them honestly, Ron, were asymptomatic. They would get COVID, we would find out once we tested them, but they didn’t even necessarily have any symptoms. And this was true even in babies. And we usually worry about babies getting respiratory illnesses because they have small airways. But the babies in my practice that got COVID,

One had pink eye for a day or two, the other had a runny nose for a couple of days, but the vast majority I only found because their sibling tested positive and then I tested the baby. So the risk was so small, but I literally grieve the damage we did to these children by the lockdowns. We took away their peer groups and we took away their social network and that is terrible for any human. are inherently social beings and especially children when they’re growing up, they need to interact with their peers. So I worry particularly about the very young children, the preschoolers who weren’t getting a chance to interact with other toddlers and to learn how to share and learn how to do interactive play. We have a fair amount of data showing that they were quite damaged by the lockdowns. 

And then I worry a lot about the adolescents. know, within a couple of months of COVID breaking out, being proclaimed a pandemic, suicide rates in teens doubled. And it stayed up for quite some time. And beyond the children and adolescents that actually killed themselves, there were huge numbers that suffered from clinical anxiety and clinical depression. You know, we taught a whole generation of children to be scared of other people because they were harbors of germs. You know, I’m in the camp that says kids need to play in the dirt, you know, and share their food with their classmates. 

And you need to cultivate germs from your environment in order to modulate your immune system. So the whole premise of keeping people away because they were such an infectious disease threat was not justified in my opinion. And then even after we had the shots, you know, they never were designed, the trials were never designed to show that they stopped transmission. They didn’t stop transmission. So, you know, this whole premise of, you know, you have to get vaccinated in order to save granny was really not based in science. And I really worry about kids who in their formative years were growing up with that kind of fear of being close to other people that, you know, a hug or sitting on your grandparents lap could literally kill them. That was never shown scientifically to be true. But I had patients, you know, who were diagnosed with COVID that looked at meand with terror said, you am I going to kill my granny with this? And that just broke my heart.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (12:53)

You mentioned like you mentioned the case of a child with leukemia dying with COVID and during COVID I believe many of those deaths were not registered as being from leukemia but from COVID. Just run us past that statistic you shared at the beginning of that last question, one in a million, one in two million, one what? I think that bears repeating and repeating slowly because I don’t think people fully appreciate how little the risk was. Just say that again. You mentioned it.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (13:25)

Yeah, so that was based on looking at six different countries. The United States and several places in Europe were included in that statistic, and that was considered to be the death rate that wasn’t necessarily due to COVID alone, but where a child died with COVID and they usually had a chronic illness. Now, many parents in my practice thought that the risks were much higher than that and that the risks were high for just healthy children. And that was because of the way that they saw things being portrayed in the media. It’s hard to think back to this time, but in the spring of 2020, know, all the major networks were showing ICUs and emergency rooms and sort of emphasizing that things were.

You know, being overwhelmed. And that was true in a few cities, but not everywhere because during that time and in my local town, the hospital was like a ghost town. You know, we didn’t really have that influx of COVID patients and we had shut down all the emergency, I mean, all the operating rooms for elective surgery. And, you know, the staff was walking around with not much to do. So it’s, the power of a story told with emotion really gets to people. And in this situation where what they were seeing on TV was so terrifying, they extrapolated that down to their children. And there really wasn’t a voice on the network saying the risk for children is so small. And all the parents that tried to mobilize and say, we don’t think that we should shut down the schools tended to be marginalized or people made fun of them or when they spoke at their school board meetings or at you know, PTA meetings, they were were denigrated. And so it was a situation where the story got a lot of momentum. 

Dr Ron Ehrlich (15:38)

Yeah. And I think, well, as you say, the US population is really a standout globally for not only spending so much on healthcare, in fact double what most other countries do, but literally having one of the worst health outcomes. So that’s interesting.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (16:01)

It bothers me so much that people from around the world tend to follow what the CDC and what Dr. Fauci said, because I feel like we don’t have a good enough track record to be coaching the rest of the world at all.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (16:11)

Well, that’s an interesting one, Liz, because I recently in a last week’s podcast spoke to Patricia Lema who wrote that book, Toxic Load Theory and I shared with her a new test that I have for people know, many people have the idea of IQ and EQ. Everyone knows what IQ and EQ is. But there’s this other thing that I call HQ, which is health quotient. And your health quotient is a function of not only your health, but your knowledge of what influences it. And I have a very simple test for measuring a person’s HQ, health quotient. And it involves five letters. And I say to a person, what do you think of RFK Jr? And I stop and I wait and I listen and I’m asking all my listeners that question as well. And some of them may be going, complete nutter, complete nutter. And I’m sure…

They are not my regular listeners. When I say those letters to you, what are the things that come to your mind?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (17:19)

Well, first of all, I think he is on the right track in terms of trying to look out for the children of our country and the fact that they have so much more chronic disease than they should. I think that going after ultra processed foods was a great initial priority because our foods are terrible. You walk down our supermarkets and you know, the packaging is, you know, bright colors and neon colors and, you know, it’s all full of sugar and preservatives. And those are not real food. And the sections that would look like a European market are just around the periphery of the store and probably only take up about 10 or 20 percent of the store. So that was a good first thing.

He also is very actively looking at the link between vaccines and chronic illness. And this is an area of special interest of mine. And I am one of the relatively few pediatricians that does think that vaccines are either an antecedent, a trigger or a mediator for autism in a susceptible group of children. And you may have seen Ron that our CDC has just recently amended its website, not that much of an amendment because they still have the title that vaccines do not cause autism, but now they have an asterisk next to it. 

And then they go on to say, but this isn’t an evidence-based claim. So they are actually vowing that they will do more studies and that acknowledging that the statement previously was misleading because it was not based in science and evidence the way that people were led to believe. So I have to believe that Bobby Kennedy Jr. was somehow behind that. And he really has my support. think the reason that he’s perceived as a nutter or crazy, as you mentioned, is that he has seen evidence of some malfeasance and some fraud that most people would not like to acknowledge has happened in our government and in the pharmaceutical industry. 

And as a lawyer who has spent his life suing big companies for pollution, he somehow is not as afraid of those companies and those big institutions as a lot of other people are. And he also somehow manages to keep going despite the fact that he gets the most horrific press every day. You know, if I had one article a week that talked about me the way that he does every single day, you know, I’d be curled up in a fetal position and crying, but he, it rolls off his back like water off a duck. It’s really quite remarkable. That’s like his superpower is he has such a strong conviction.

That he has seen the evidence that things need to change dramatically, that he won’t be swayed by criticism and ad hominem attacks on him personally. So I would encourage people to try to have a bit of an open mind and to, you know, he even said when he was speaking to HHS on his first speech that if he was really like, the guy they wrote about in the newspapers, he wouldn’t want to work for himself either. But that’s really not the way he is. so I applaud his efforts. I’ve offered to try to help behind the scenes to make some of these things go forth. And I really wish him Godspeed.

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Dr Ron Ehrlich (22:34)

I could not agree more with you and I find it almost laughable, paradoxical for sure, that people are concerned that he is somehow undermining a system that has proved itself to be so poor when it comes to healthcare. I mean, I believe out of the top 40 OECD countries, America comes in at around number 36, just above Ethiopia and just below

Eritrea or something like that. That’s where America is and that’s what they’re concerned that he may be undermining it and it is such a behemoth for media, academia, doctors and this is another story that’s easy to miss but once you hear it difficult to ignore. It’s just extraordinary what that guy puts up with but I admire him greatly and Liz you have a very high HQ I can tell that for sure. Listen…

But Patti Lema also has a very high HQ too. But listen, a significant part of the book explores COVID vaccine programs in children, trial quality, safety concerns, such as myocarditis and the decision to include these vaccines in childhood immunization schedules, which I’m sure if you could give us that 101 where you’re at there. How do you currently assess risks and benefits of for various pediatric groups and what does genuine informed consent look like for families? I mean, let’s talk a little bit about the vaccination program in America per se because I think when people outside of America hear this story, they could only be shocked by what you guys are having to endure and are trying to, in inverted commas, again, protect.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (24:22)

Yeah, so in terms of the childhood vaccination schedule, know, my disclaimer is I was a classically trained pediatrician and I gave many vaccines in my career. But in the nineties, I started being suspicious that they had kind of a dark side that maybe the risks from them in terms of chronic illness or risk of autism or risk of autoimmunity.

Might be outweighing the benefits that were attributed to them. So, many people don’t realize, but for Texas, which is whooping cough was actually declining greatly in terms of the mortality. It had gone down dramatically long before the vaccine was even approved and the same was true for measles. So, the vaccine sort of mythologically get more credit than I think they necessarily deserve. The to informed consent, we should really sit down and talk to people about the risks versus the benefits. And in our practice, we would keep a notebook about all the vaccines and the patients could leave through the notebook in the waiting room or before or after the visit. And we always made the package inserts available to people. 

Now, that takes a long time, frankly. In the average pediatric visit in our country is somewhere between seven and 10 minutes. And you could easily spend the whole time talking about, you know, potential side effects. you know, some of them are very rare, but that still means they happen to somebody’s child. So true informed consent, I believe, is when parents have a true understanding of the risk versus the benefit. 

Now, this is the way it’s more likely to play out in a lot of places. And this is because pediatricians are busy. They are being pressured by the groups that they work for to see five patients an hour. And so it often gets abbreviated to, know, little Johnny is due for shot A, B, C, and D today. And here’s the form you need to sign to say that we’re giving it to them.

And so that’s really not true informed consent. We should at least go over the major side effects and let them know that there are some uncommon, but potentially serious side effects. It gets further complicated though, because at least in Virginia, a certain number of immunizations, most of the ones on the childhood schedule are required if you want to go to public school. And so you’re essentially trying to exercise informed consent, which would imply that you could dissent and not agree to it. But then if that’s the case, you either have to homeschool your child or send them to private school. 

So it kind of hampers the true informed consent intent, I think. It is striking that our immunization schedule expanded so dramatically after there was an act by our Congress in 1986 that I think was well intended. And people that were very concerned about vaccine safety had input into that act, but it removed the liability from the pharmaceutical industry and put it onto our government. And people who were harmed by vaccines were supposed to be able to get quick justice through what’s colloquially called vaccine court, but what in reality is a burdensome federal kind of bureaucratic procedure that doesn’t usually serve the child’s interests, I believe. 

So it’s very complicated and COVID added another layer because it was added to the recommended CDC schedule down to six months of age. And I was shocked by that. may know, Ron, that one of the children, one of the girls in the trial of about a thousand participants actually developed paralysis and gastroparesis, which is paralysis of the GI tract in the trial, presented with symptoms within the first 24 hours.

And yet her symptoms were downplayed as abdominal pain when Pfizer reported that to the FDA. So how many of your patients who have children would accept a vaccine with a one in a thousand chance of causing paralysis for what was basically an upper respiratory infection that might, know, 50-50 chance would be asymptomatic in their child. So, eliminating that information from the public, I think, was fraudulent. And the other concern I had was that when they started recommending the boosters, they had like 140 children in a trial for boosters, and they didn’t follow them for very long. 

If repeated injections were going to cause any kind of long-term problems, myocarditis, example, autoimmunity, for another example, you’re not necessarily going to pick that up in 140 people, but then you’re going to go ahead and give it to millions of children. So, you know, the side effects that are one in 2000, you know, start really affecting the kids that get the shots. So I think from the very beginning, the principle of first, you know, harm was not really acknowledged because we were doing an untested vaccine technology on children who were at very little risk from the actual illness that that technology was allegedly going to protect them from.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (30:36)

How long did they follow the trial up? You say they didn’t follow it up for very long. How long was that? mean, was it weeks?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (30:44)

For most of the trials, it was a period of weeks. Some followed them for months. When they followed them for months, one of the things that they found, which is also not well publicized, is that the protection seemed to wear off after about five to six weeks in a significant proportion of the patients that got it. So there was some initial immune suppression in the first two weeks after the shot and you are more susceptible to either getting COVID or another respiratory illness during that time, then it seemed to have some protection for a few more weeks. And then after five to six weeks, you were kind of back to baseline. So at least on the basis of some populations, it seemed to be a very transient kind of protection that you were taking such a big chance on, in my opinion.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (31:41)

And ironically, many people who had received their boosters did become more susceptible to COVID. But the interesting thing there was their response to that was, thank goodness I got my booster. It’s a beautiful, it’s a wonderful marketing success story there really. Not a great public health success story, but what a wonderful marketing success story.

You become more susceptible to the disease and when you get it, you actually say, thank goodness I got the thing that made me more susceptible to the disease and you become an advocate. But you talk about side effects Liz. I’m guessing that if people were immune compromised and we’ve already mentioned that a lot of people in America have poor health, then those side effects would become more frequent, more significant.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (32:36)

It could have been worse.

Yeah, so for people that are already immune compromised, the fact that T cell immunity, which is cellular immunity, the kind of the part of your immune system that tries to protect you from bacteria, funguses and viruses is temporarily suppressed. So if you are already starting out with a suppressed immune system.

You know, that was actually one of the groups that theoretically would benefit because you were trying to protect them. But one of the side effects of this particular gene product was that it did suppress T cell immunity. So theoretically, those people would actually be more susceptible to either getting COVID again or getting other respiratory illnesses. You know, one of the big concerns in especially young men was the myocarditis risk. And one of the things that surprised me so much was when I listened in on a ACIP meeting, that’s the American Committee for Immunization Practices, that was in June of 2021, they had data at that point that recipients of the COVID injections were 12 times more likely in certain age groups to actually get myocarditis.

But they talked in that meeting as if they hoped it was going to be kind of a kinder gentler myocarditis. And it turns out that a lot of the kids that did get myocarditis were sick for, you know, six to 12 months. A lot of them couldn’t play sports. The typical story was, you know, a star basketball player that gets the shot because he had to get it in order to do travel basketball.

And then he gets myocarditis and can’t play basketball for a year. And so I was surprised when they continued to recommend it when in June of 2021, when they knew that there was that 12 fold risk, it wasn’t just a double risk or triple risk was literally 12 fold. And I think somehow they lost sight of the fact that it really wasn’t hurting kids that much and went aheadand recommended it for reasons I didn’t. I don’t really agree with, but that’s what was done.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (35:01)

You mentioned also this act in 1986 which removed liability from the drug companies themselves for adverse reactions and transferred it to the government. The platform on which that occurs, I think if I’m not wrong, is called the VAERS, Vaccine Adverse Reaction Register or something like that. Is that right? And I believe it’s quite a cumbersome site to engage with to record adverse reactions for.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (35:27)

Well, yeah, they’re actually not directly related. So there’s vaccine adverse event reporting system is one of the ways that doctors and patients or any interested party can report vaccine injuries. And we, as physicians, are supposed to report everything we suspect is a vaccine injury. And I’ve filed a lot of their reports in my career, and I’ve never heard back from the CDC for any kind of clarifying information.

But many young residents that I have taught didn’t even know about theirs, didn’t even know that that was their responsibility. And the under-reporting factor is about 99%. So theirs, based on a Harvard study in 2011, captures about 1 % of injuries. And that is a way to document what things you see with certain vaccines. Now, when you are going through vaccine court, there’s what’s called a table of injuries where for each given vaccine, there are certain types of reactions that are considered to be compensatable and others that aren’t. And in my mind, the compensatable injuries tend to be very narrowly conscribed. 

For example, with certain vaccines, you can get an encephalitis, but in order to be compensated for it, it has to occur within seven days of the vaccine, be recognized within seven days. And there are some smoldering encephalitis or encephalopathy pictures that are going to be autoimmune in nature and evolve more slowly than that. And by definition, they’re going to lie outside the table injuries and not be compensated. So there is, and this was laid down in 1986, and obviously we know a lot more about pathways and mechanism of injury and certainly genetic predispositions to disease than we did back in 86. But those table injuries are typically what is relied upon for compensating the victims.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:43)

Adverse reactions, if I’m not mistaken, there is a list of about 130 potential adverse reactions and you mentioned 2011 and I remember reading a report, light reading from the Institute of Medicine did a report in 2011 on adverse reactions from vaccines and I think this is where an absence of evidence doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occur. They concluded that most of the adverse reactions didn’t have any studies done. So from that we can’t conclude anything. So an absence of evidence.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (38:25)

Yeah. So the Institute of Medicine is actually quite interesting, the way they operate. had a lot of faith in them initially. And I went to, so they’ve met several times on this vaccine issue and several times on the vaccine autism issue. And in, I believe it was 2001, they met and we now have through freedom of information documents the chair of the committee saying before any of the evidence was presented that the CDC wants us to declare that vaccines are safe and effective and we will never come down on the side of saying that vaccines actually cause autism. That was a quote and that was this was before the study was done.

It was before the evidence was reviewed before the meeting. And then I went to a meeting in 2004 and a number of my colleagues were presenting to the Institute of Medicine and they had mechanistic studies about how at the time we were looking at thimerosal toxicity and how that was such a bad neurotoxin and how it induced autoimmunity and how it could induce autoimmune encephalitis. And we had animal studies and, you know, at that time, parental reports of significant regressions. But when I read the report, it was as if I had gone to a totally different meeting than they had because they had chosen to not consider the mechanistic evidence, the animal evidence or the parental reports. 

And so in my estimation, my critique is that they have relied too heavily on population-based epidemiologic studies and not looked at the individual, the individual genomics, the individual susceptibility, the total toxic load, as Patty Leamer would say, and basically just chose to not consider a lot of the evidence that I thought was pretty compelling. And, you know, these were colleagues of mine that had really dedicated themselves to doing this work.

So that was my experience. then, so what they ended up saying was, you know, for the evidence at the time was insufficient to either accept or reject the hypothesis that vaccines could cause autism. And in the fine print, they said, we acknowledge that this might happen in a small subset, but we don’t think it’s significant. And we don’t think it’s worth it worthy of further study. And this is at a time when autism had already gone from one in 5,000 to probably at that time it was somewhere around one in 186 or so. And then as you know, since then it has continued to affect more and more children such that now in our country it’s one in 31 children based on kids that were born 12 years ago. So probably even worse than that for the kids that are being born today.

I really have never been able to come to grips with the fact that when we were seeing exploding rates of chronic illness in children, there would be this dismissal that it was maybe a small subset, but not worth studying. My thought is study the kids that regress, try to figure out what is it about them that makes them susceptible? Because in an ideal world, maybe we could develop a test so that before we give vaccines, we can see the kids that have mitochondrial problems or low glutathione or abnormalities in their folate metabolism or difficulty methylated or problems with transulphuration. All things that we know are common in kids with autism. If we could find that out ahead of time, maybe we could modify the way we give vaccines to those children or even radical notion consider that maybe the vaccine is worse for them than the risk of the underlying illnesses. So that’s what I would like to see happen eventually. We need to learn from what these families and these children have been telling us for literally decades and try to figure out what it is about these kids that makes them so vulnerable.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (42:52)

I mean, I hate to say it, but I think reputations and ego often Trump, use the word lightly there, Trump public health outcomes. But just before we move on to what I just, did ask you how many vaccines does a child under the age of 18 get in America? Just can you give us that figure? Because I think that’s breathtaking.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (43:16)

Yeah, I think it’s 72 if you count the injections infancy, they’re a bunch pre kindergarten. There’s some more when they’re 6th grade, some more before college. So it ends up being 69 or 72, depending on what what brand names you use.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (43:36)

Yeah and bearing in mind that I think in Australia this is certainly the case that at birth some children are also given hepatitis B vaccines which is extraordinary just there alone.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (43:50)

Yeah, and there’s a big move right now. In fact, the CDC is considering striking that requirement. I think today’s the last day for us to comment to the CDC how we feel about that. The new ACIP committee is reevaluating the risk benefit ratio on that and seems to be coming down on the side that they’re going to recommend postponing it because.

Most babies on day one are not at risk for Hep B and there are ways to identify the mothers who potentially would have a Hep B positive child. So I personally support that initiative. I have never really personally recommended that shot on day one of life or I never even gave it at one month of age or two months of age. I tried to delay it as long as possible in order to comply with the school requirements for my patients and I am convinced that was the right decision.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (44:52)

I mean that committee I know has been reformed and is coming under huge criticism in the media and in academic circles and in regulatory bodies because it is shock horror filled with experts in the field who are not connected with the pharmaceutical industry and they are coming up

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (45:18)

You’re doing some courageous and intelligent work. When I listened to their committee meetings, there are a lot more probing questions and compared to when I listened to the previous ACIP committees where, you know, the CDC folks would present a bunch of graphics and there was, you know, maybe a few clarifying questions, but, you know, usually ended up being a unanimous vote to put forth whatever it was that was being recommended. So. I have more confidence in the current ACIP committee than most people are voicing. I think they’re on the right track and I think they’re asking the tough questions and in my estimation, it’s well overdue.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (46:03)

And another example of your exemplary high HQ Liz, I must say. Listen, the subtitle in your book is costly mistakes that must never happen again. And if you were, this is a good question for now, if you were in a room with public health leaders, what are the two or three most important changes you would push for before the next public health crisis?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (46:23)

Well, the first thing I would do is to, to advise them to take another look at the value of closing schools and keeping kids away from their peers because that was psychologically so completely devastating. It was really quite terrible for so many children and it was it did not have a clear benefit in Sweden where they did not do that. There were no horrible rates of death in either students or teachers. So I think we need to learn from other countries that played it differently. 

Secondly, I would demand that they do adequate trials of new technology before mandating it or even putting it on the schedule for children. And those trials should be well supervised so that patients that develop paralysis in the trial wouldn’t be reported as having had a stomach ache. And they, you know, would have, it’s very expensive. They have to do many, many thousands of children who again would be in a trial where they had accepted the risks in order to identify rare side effects. But when you have something that’s going to be given ubiquitously to the whole population, ideally in their mind, you know, you’re going to affect millions of children. 

And so you need to look for the side effects. And then I also would implore them to look at what happens to children when the parents financial lives and jobs are destroyed, because one of the side effects of this pandemic lockdown was that there was more domestic violence, there was more child abuse, people you know, drank, the alcoholism got worse, people who were using drugs had more to escape from. There were just so many downstream mental health effects on the adult population that trickled down to the children. So those would be my three high priorities if I were queen next time around.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (48:36)

Well, here’s hoping. But listen for parents listening today. What are some practical steps they could take now to safeguard their children’s health and resilience moving forward?

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (48:48)

Yeah, so first of all, have confidence that your child’s immune system is really quite good. Children have very good innate immunity. Innate immunity is the non-specific immunity that happens early on in an illness where all the troops come out. You know, they sort out later on exactly what it is that the bacteria, the viruses, but initially kids respond very well. And especially for COVID.

They had seen many other coronaviruses with their other just run-of-the-mill colds and upper respiratory infections. So they already had some cross-reactive immunity to this. So have confidence that they have good innate immunity. But in order to maintain that, you have to feed them really well and have them play in the dirt. So make sure that they’re getting lots of fruits and vegetables, adequate protein, adequate good fats.

They need especially vitamin C in order to fight viruses. Vitamin D is very important to fight inflammation. Zinc is one of the things that was very helpful during COVID. And those are all available over the counter without a prescription. And hopefully you can find a naturopath or a clinician that can advise you about that, or you can look at one of the many sources available about how to enhance your natural immunity. 

The other thing is don’t be afraid, so afraid of germs. I don’t want your kids using Purell or other hand sanitizers all the time. We know that that destroys their own natural flora. I want your kids to play in the dirt. You I don’t really mind if, you know, they drop their apple on the ground and then pick it up and take a bite of it you know, all those microbes in the earth are supposed to be helping us. We’re supposed to be living in harmony in a synchronous pattern with those. So the germ phobia, the having to wash your hands all the time, you know, first of all, for respiratory virus, that may help some, but the reality is that, you know, the droplets are spreading.

And it’s not so much that your groceries were so dangerous to you that you had to wash them off as we were told make sure your kids get a lot of sunshine and are outside a lot. There’s a lot of evidence about being outside, especially if they can run barefoot on the beautiful Australian beaches or in the grass elsewhere that that is just so good for their overall health. Their inherent state is healthy. We have done things to our children, at least in America, that have made them unhealthy by way of not feeding them whole foods, letting them have a lot of processed foods letting them play video games late at night, not getting enough sleep, having them be inside because we maybe are afraid of our neighborhood, that it’s not safe for them to be outside or we can’t find a way to make time to take them to parks and playgrounds. But their inherent basic state is to be healthy.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (52:17)

Liz, what a note for us to finish on. I know you are coming to Australia for another one of those wonderful Mind Conferences Forum which will be on in April, May next year. I’ll have links to that forum but I’ll have links to your book and thank you so much not only for everything you’ve done but for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us here today.

Dr Elizabeth Mumper (52:38)

Ron, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you and thank you so much for inviting me back. I really appreciate it.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (52:43)

Now Liz is coming out to the MIND Forum which is on every year and in 2026 is going to be on from April 29th to May 2nd and it’s a great program that I would encourage you if you are a clinician, there is a stream for clinicians but there is a separate stream for parents or people interested in this whole issue of toxicity and its impact on neurodevelopmental problems. Increasingly adults are being given diagnoses of ADHD and autism and this is a growing issue for not just children but adults. So the Mind Forum is a great opportunity to listen to a different narrative, to a different story and a story that is empowering. That’s important. There is so much that can be done and with knowledge comes power and the Mind Forum is a great opportunity to improve your knowledge and one of those speakers, one of many speakers at that conference is Dr. Elizabeth.

We’ll have links to that Mindforum and we’ll also have links to Liz’s book Kids and COVID, Costly Mistakes That Must Never Happen Again. I hope this finds you well. Until next time, this is Dr Ron Erlich. Be well. 

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This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.

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Disclaimer:

Podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.