Welcome to the Kambian podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno.

Okay, in today's conversation, we're talking about vaccines.

Yes, vaccines, a word that used to feel pretty clinical, scientific, maybe even boring.

Who cared about vaccinology and virology, right?

But this has obviously become a cultural flashpoint.

Lines have been drawn, voices raised, and public trust in medicine, certainly in vaccinology,

has pretty much eroded. But what if we could talk about vaccines differently, without shouting,

without labeling, without assuming the worst of each other? My guest today, Dr. Joel Gader Warsh, is someone who's been trying to walk that

tightrope for years, a board-certified pediatrician with a master's in epidemiology,

and a deep background in integrative medicine.

Joel is also the author of the brave forthcoming book between a shot and a hard

place, a book that doesn't argue necessarily for or against vaccines, but rather dares to ask the

question, why can't we just talk about them sanely and rigorously. In this conversation, Joel takes us inside the

uncomfortable space between certainty and skepticism. We explore how during the COVID-19 pandemic,

the language of public health began to unravel, safe and effective, quote-unquote, became a mantra,

repeated, but not explained.

And when the messaging didn't match the emerging data, people didn't just get confused.

They got wary and some got angry.

Others quietly walked away from the system altogether.

Joel brings a unique and sometimes dispassionate lens to all of it, one grounded in science, but also in real life conversations with thousands

of parents over the years. He unpacks the dramatic rise in chronic childhood illnesses,

the tension between public health goals and

...