Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1261 - Peter Hotez
Uploaded: 2019-03-12T02:05:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1261 - Peter Hotez' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1261 - Peter Hotez' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-12. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1261 - Peter Hotez

and we're alive how are you sir how are you good to see you again i'm thrilled
to be here thanks
for doing this man thanks for having i know i should tell people before we get
started i did
not know when i asked you to come back on that you were heavily involved in
this whole vaccine
debate what i wanted to have you on to talk about is tropical diseases because
i remember when we
did that sci-fi show um you explained to me that some ungodly percentage of
people that live in
tropical climates are infected by parasites that's right well my day job is
developing vaccines for
tropical diseases we develop the vaccines no one else will make because they're
for the world's
poorest people so we call them tropical diseases but they really are diseases
of poverty the vaccine
issue the the advocacy issue around vaccines and autism is kind of a new thing
that i got drawn
into just because i'm a parent of an adult daughter with autism and i make
vaccines so it was a natural
that i'd get drawn into it yeah so when i said that you were going to come on
then i got inundated by
people that are you know the the vaccine thing is such a polarizing issue yeah
it's awful and so many
people seem to think they absolutely know what causes what especially when it
comes to something
like autism which is uh it's a huge issue in this country it's a huge issue
around the world and it
doesn't didn't used to seem to be the question is was that because it was undiagnosed
was that because
it just there's it's more prevalent today what do you think what is your take
on well i don't think we
really know um one thing's for sure we're diagnosing people with autism who we
diagnosed with as
something else in the past you know whether it was you know really horrible
diagnosis we'd use
pejorative terms like mental retardation what's the matter jamie sorry my bad
just telling the clock was
off oh okay sorry sorry should we start again no no it's okay he was just
saying he was just telling
me that our clock is screwed up because of the daylight savings time right
sorry totally unrelated to what
you're the whole country's clock is screwed up because yeah yeah right um so so
we don't know we don't
well you know one thing's clear that the number of diagnoses is going up but
part of that is because
what we used to call pejorative things like mental retardation now get thrown
into the autism
category the other thing they do absolutely how so well you know now we call it
as part of the autism
spectrum um we also because autism often has a lot of associated intellectual
disabilities not always
but sometimes uh the other is that um can i pause for sure is that based on uh
aptitude tests like
how do you how do they decide how do they decide what's autism yes they they
have a list of diagnostic uh
categories but it's not basically it's not like you could test someone if they
test positive for a
disease that's right that's right well although it you know one of the
interesting side pieces to this
is you know the there's a group of in people out there who self-identify
themselves as the autistics
and they get very resentful or hurt when they're called a disease or a disorder
and because they say well we're not an epidemic we're we're a person and they
it's part of this
whole neurodiversity movement which is quite interesting neurodiversity
movement right they
say they're neurodiverse that they you know maybe think differently from others
and they respond
differently than others but they're not quote abnormal and and i think they
have a good argument
um i heard a crazy argument once with someone that was so the point is that it's
you know the the
impairment like rachel my daughter it's not so much her autism that uh uh thwarts
her you know ability
to have partners or to uh have a meaningful career it's the fact that she has
profound in her case
profound intellectual disability that goes along with it um i forget what i was
going to say so when
when they say that people have a there's a spectrum right and some people who
are autistic
have incredible abilities that's right they have incredible mathematical
abilities musical abilities
language abilities and then some people do not and some people have legitimate
issues yeah with rachel's
case my daughter it's um she has a pretty good verbal iq 80 90 but she has a
very low performance iq in 40.
she can't do simple math she can't count money uh fortunately goodwill
industries came to her rescue
and our rescue and now she works there two hours a day sorting clothes and and
that's been really
meaningful for her to get a paycheck oh that's great even if it's minimum wage
yeah right just to do
something and feel right yeah that's and feel part of the mix yeah that's huge
that's huge for
everyone right absolutely yeah absolutely um but so there's no uh there's it's
not like you could test
positive for syphilis or you can test positive for the flu right although now
you know as i say you
know so that's why i don't like using those those terms because it it puts
people on the autism spectrum
as though they have a disease right store which i don't like to do but if it is
a disorder no well you
know now we know there are 99 genes that are linked to autism but why is it a
bad thing to say that
you have a disorder if it's just a disorder you know people have disorders it's
a fact well you
know a lot of the individuals in that that self-identify themselves as the autistics
don't like to think
of themselves as a disorder they like to think of themselves as different it's
different but not
necessarily as a disorder right but that doesn't help us when we're trying to
discuss it does it yeah it
gets very it's it's hard it gets hard to talk about well also they're trying to
stop you from talking
about it in a certain fashion which is actually accurate right when they have
an issue there is an
issue to say there's no issue is kind of ridiculous it's i mean there's a
reason why so many people are
so concerned about autism and vaccines and just autism in general whether it's
an environmental pollution
factors what they like to do is they like to make the distinction between
autism that neurodiversity
thing and actually having intellectual disabilities that go along with it okay
and maybe it's a bit
of semantics also but they feel strongly about it right now if we don't know
what causes autism we do we
do well we're getting there very closely so we've now there was a very
important paper produced by
written by a group at the broad institute harvard mit which is one of the
premier genetics genomics
organizations in the country and they've now identified 99 genes it's a it's a
huge team
of scientists not only at the broad including peace scientists at baylor
college of medicine 99 genes
involved in autism all involved in early fetal development uh early brain
development uh in the
first and second trimester of pregnancy so now we're starting to really get our
arms around what autism is
and that's one of the things i talk about in the book i mean we we have learned
so much in the last
couple of years about autism how it begins early fetal development well before
kids ever see vaccines
and that's one of the reasons i say vaccines did not cause rachel's autism
vaccines don't cause autism
because autism is already underway in early early brain development is it
possible that some people have
this tendency towards autism and it's exacerbated by vaccines i don't think so
um i think what what
happens is the sequence of events happens uh during pregnancy but the full
clinical expression of autism
often doesn't happen until 18 or 19 months of age like rachel for instance wasn't
actually diagnosed
until 19 months of age and there's some fabulous studies now showing that that
clinical expression
of autism actually coincides with a big increase in the exp in the volume of
the brain you can actually
show on serial magnet magnetic resonance imaging serial mri how the brain
starts to the brain volume
starts to increase and that's very important because parents uh will often
remember oh my kid got
vaccinated around 18 months of age or 15 months of age and want to link the two
but now you can go back
to six months of age and this is studies done at the university of north carolina
chapel hill showing
so that you could do an mri at six months of age and they can predict now with
they say with 90 accuracy
which of the kids will go on to develop autism and then you could take what are
they seeing what what are
they seeing um they can see i have you have to go we can go into detail in the
paper but they can see
certain things on signatures on mri that tell them that this kid is going to go
on to uh develop okay
so in fact there is a way to test positive for autism then with this serial mri
that's what they
think right that's and now we have the 99 gene so we can even take it back
further by doing what's
called whole exome sequencing sequencing all the dna all the expressed dna of
an individual and in rachel's
case we did that and we actually found a mutation in in a gene controlling uh
neuronal connections which
makes a lot of sense if you think about what autism yeah of course so so there
is a way to to show
whether children will be more likely to develop autism and there's either there
is a way to look at their
brain through fmri at a very early age and and also do the and also do genetic
sequence so it's not
simply a matter of how they perform on cognitive tests that's right that's
right we're getting much
better at getting arms around the diagnosis why do you think there's so many
people that have these
anecdotal stories of their child getting vaccinated especially large doses of
vaccines when they hit them
with like 10 in a row and then all of a sudden or measles measles mumps and
rebellious the one that
gets repeated over and over again that's the one that made my child have autism
i've heard that so many
times and i've heard it from friends from friends that have children that have
autism they had a child
their child got the measles mumps rebellious shot and then immediately there
was a very distinct
change in the child's behavior well no question when you get the measles mumps
rubella vaccine
many times kids cry and things like that and then autism will then begin
sometime between the first and
second year of life so it's logical to want to connect the two but now we know
it's not even plausible
because we know that if you go back to that mri at six months of age or go back
prenatally we can even
determine which kids are going to go on to develop autism so even though this
and then complementing
it complementing it our massive epidemiologic studies done on over one million
kids that in fact a new
paper was just released this week showing that kids who get the mr get the mmr
vaccine are no more likely to
get autism than kids who don't who don't get the mmr vaccine and the converse
is also true kids on the
autism spectrum are no more of likely to have gotten the mmr vaccine than kids
not on the autism spectrum
okay so so it's the combination of that those big studies of over one million
kids together with
knowing what autism is that completely rules out the possibility right so these
genes excuse me the and
the issue with these genes and then the ability to scan the brain with the
serial mri and so you can
tell which children have the propensity is it possible that children have all
these issues and then do not
get autism or do 100 of those children with those issues get autism that's a
good question uh i don't
know i'm a vaccine scientist so i'm you know the not a biologist well well i'm
a biologist but i'm a
vaccine scientist who who's really tried to do a deep dive in autism doing
research on the book versus
human development right right okay so um so what you're saying though is that
if a child does not
have these mutations and does not have these issues that are present and during
a serial mri that they
will not 