But while they were seized on, they were having people feel warned that there was a danger in vaccines.

That's right.

And, you know, there is still some risk.

Nothing human beings do is without risk.

And any medical procedure, of course, carries with it some measure of risk.

At this point, vaccines are the safest medical technology available right now.

That's the safest one that we use.

Do you have any feeling for what's at the heart of this? Is it mostly simple ignorance? Is it a desire to control people through fear to achieve power, some position of authority over them? What's mainly going on here? Or is it just a multiplicity of bad, you know, a perfect storm of public health?

Just give us kind of a, a, a brief overview of the book so people can understand what the argument is and the scope.

Well, uh, Pox on Fools came to be because one of my editors, my, my London-based editor, right after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got nominated as, as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, told me I had to write this book.

I didn't have any choice.

And the reason was the, the, the, that it was clear that with that nomination, anti-vaccine, not just the rhetoric, but the actual anti-vaccine policy, was gonna land at the center of the American public health apparatus, and it was gonna have, you know, in ways that it hadn't at any time previously, however influential it may have been, have real impact on, um, the way the US encounters infectious disease for, you know, the foreseeable future.

And so that, that's something that, that is really scary given what, what we know about infectious disease, what we've learned in, in painful ways over many years.

[sniffs] So I set out to write the book, and I didn't wanna just write another simple vaccines work, which they do, and we should use them, which we should, and the people who tell you they don't are not telling you the truth and here's why.

That, you know, those facts are out there.

Yeah, recently.