I Never Talked About Vaccines Publicly. Then President Trump Held a Press Conference.

Less than 24 hours before I sat down with Ray Kober on Broken Healthcare Podcast, the President of the United States said things out loud that I had only ever said in private.

I have been careful about vaccines - not because I don’t have thoughts.

I have a lot of thoughts.

I’ve watched hundreds of hours of ACIP meetings. I’ve read the studies. I practiced emergency medicine through Covid. I’ve sat across from mothers telling me what happened to their child at a well-visit and then watched myself say the words “the CDC says vaccines are safe and effective” because that was what I was trained to say, and I didn’t have much better to offer.

I have been careful because the cost of not being careful in this particular conversation (even simply admitting that we don’t know what we don’t know), has historically cost your career, your credibility, and your inbox.

I wrote about it once, carefully, and the response was instructive.

Then President Trump walked up to a podium with Marty Makary, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Oz, and Dorothy Fink and said what many of us have been thinking for years. That there seem to be some things we don’t fully know. That the effects of one vaccine are likely different from the effects of six vaccines given all at once. That medications taken during pregnancy or given to infants could have unintended biological effects. That perhaps there are treatments that could provide real symptom improvement in autistic kids that are yet to be discovered or recommended.

Not a wellness influencer or some fringe blogger - the freaking President of the United States. With the FDA Commissioner, the CMS Administrator and the NIH Director standing behind him.

That press conference happened less than 24 hours before I sat down with Ray Kober for this episode of Broken Healthcare. So when he asked me what I thought — I told him.

My daughter had a seizure the day of her well-visit. An series of MRIs showed progressive demyelination - the result of some inflammatory or autoimmune process I was told.

“We don’t know if she’ll develop normally. We don’t know what caused this to happen, and we know you asked about her vaccinations that morning, but we know it wasn’t related those. Vaccines don’t cause this.”

I was a young mom with no medical training and I believed them.

It took me years - and a medical degree, and years of hearing that same story come out of other mothers’ mouths while I stood on the other side of the exam table — to understand what had actually happened in that conversation.

The actual truth was, they didn’t know. They just weren’t willing to say so.

And that’s the part that makes me the angriest. Not the uncertainty, because uncertainty is honest. But the certainty performed in the presence of uncertainty that has cost us everything - including trust in public health.

Forty to seventy percent of mothers of autistic children believe a vaccine appointment preceded the change in their child. You can argue about the science on causation all you want. You cannot argue that we know anything definitively or that those women deserved to be dismissed.

Ray and I also got into what the actual ACIP data looks like up close — small sample sizes, safety follow-up windows of four to five days, the hepatitis B birth dose debate that the American Academy of Pediatrics was so opposed to they refused to show up and make their case. We talked about what public health was actually supposed to do versus what it did during COVID.

And we talked about why the people screaming loudest to stop asking questions are the ones with the most to lose if anyone finds an answer.

Here’s the link to the White House briefing. The full conversation is below. Ray Kober is a great interviewer — he pushes, he follows up, he doesn’t let things slide. This one went places.

If this is the first time you’re reading Signal & Noise — this is what we do here. Not telling you what to think. Giving you the information the other outlets won’t touch and letting you decide. Subscribe if you want more of it.

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And if you’re curious about what happened with my daughter. That’s here below.