Did sanitation and nutrition do more than vaccines?

In an episode of his podcast, Joe Rogan discusses many issues that we have covered in the past, including the case that sanitation and nutrition are responsible for the decline in diseases, not vaccines.

Rogan got his ideas from Suzanne Humphries, a doctor with a background in nephrology (kidney medicine).

Humphries claims it’s not a virus but toxins like DDT and arsenic that cause polio. But scientists have isolated the poliovirus from the bodies of sick people many times. They also did experiments where they gave the virus to monkeys, which then got the same kind of paralysis as people. So we know that poliovirus has caused polio in the past and the present.

She says that smallpox was eradicated because of better sanitation. But for that to be true, you would have to believe two things:

1. Better sanitation can stop a virus that spreads through the air
2. Every country in the world has good enough sanitation.

Since the worldwide effort to get rid of smallpox, there hasn’t been a single case anywhere, which shows that vaccines and not just sanitation stopped it.

Rogan discusses some graphs showing polio rates going down before the vaccine was introduced, but he completely misunderstands the graphs. The graphs, found here, show that deaths had already drastically fallen before vaccines. Cases, on the other hand, didn’t fall until vaccines were introduced.

And sanitation made polio worse. Before the 1900s, most kids were exposed to polio as babies, which helped them build natural immunity. Better sanitation from the Industrial Revolution improved health but also reduced exposure to the virus, leading to polio outbreaks.

The other concerning claims about Hep B, autism, health outcomes, placebos, and tetanus are addressed on our website.