Dr Dan Neides, former Medical Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute gives a 2017 talk on how an innocent article he wrote about vaccine safety ended his career there.
I find this talk remarkable, because he was saying all of the buzz words in 2017 that came to the forefront of popular awareness in 2021; about how forced vaccinations violate Informed Consent of the Geneva Conventions, to say nothing of the Hippocratic Oath.
I’d like to hope that the incredibly heartfelt contrition that Dr Neides expressed back then towards patients who were harmed or killed by vaccines was a foreshadowing of the mass contrition that we need to see from the medical establishment, immediately.
Below, is the transcript of his full speech.
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TRANSCRIPT
First, I would like to express my condolences to I guess ‘Little Mike’ – although you’re not that little – but you spoke very highly of your father and to the rest of the Bailey family, I’m very sorry for your loss. And while I was listening to you speak about him getting choked up, I was thinking about this past week. My own father who has retired at 77 is helping me do some work in my office, lifting 100 150 pound boxes and moving them around and the fact that you have been stolen of those 20 years I can’t even imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have those 20 years and the fact that my dad is still vital and your father, your husband was living such a vital life and was robbed of this precious time in his life.
I’m so very very sorry for your loss. I do want to mention what the lifestyle pillars are Stephanie, because you glossed over them what we focus on is nutrition, exercise, stress management, sleep hygiene but the the most important pillar that we talk about and we coach in our practice, which is number five is loving kindness.
The idea of people being open to giving and receiving love and I feel like in this country we’ve lost our way and that’s why I coach so much on people recognizing that we’re all human beings. We’re All in This Together. We really and truly are all one, so I want to give you a little bit of background in who I am and how I am ended up being here speaking to you all.
I started practicing at the Cleveland Clinic in 1996 as a family doctor. I grew up in Northeast Ohio and it was always my dream to come back and help take care of the very population of which I grew up in and my dream was met on October 28, 1996, the date that I was hired and for 17 years I practiced as a traditional allopathic family doctor in Solon, Ohio at one of the Family Health Centers and I had a wonderful practice. I truly adore my patients. I feel like they’re family and as part of that practice, I feel like one of the things that I was really doing was helping to manage illness, not really focusing on what root cause was because, I really didn’t even understand what that concept was in medical school.
We are taught a certain way and a lot of it is identify a disease state and treat with medication. And so like most other providers, I was bought and sold by Pharma. After I obtained my MBA, I was given the opportunity to become the Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chair of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute in September of 2013.
And being such a passionate educator, whether it’s teaching medical students residents or most importantly, my patients, I wanted to continue to educate and because of my position the local paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, had asked if I would be interested in writing a monthly column to again to help identify issues in wellness that could help people achieve a higher quality of life.
And so, in January of 2014, I started writing this monthly column. As a primary care doctor at the Wellness Institute, I want to just give you a little more background about how my the evolution of my practice changed. I began working side by side with some very incredible people, very passionate people who were very different from the traditional allopathic providers that I was working with for the previous 17 years as an attending.
These were people who were certified in Lifestyle Medicine, Integrative Medicine and Functional Medicine and one of the first things that I learned when I came to the Wellness Institute was “Be open to new ways of thinking” – and that was an understatement!
So, one of the difficulties that patients have when they see an Integrative or Functional Medicine specialist is going back to a primary care physician and sharing that experience. The primary care doctor will often do a lot of eye rolling, a lot of head shaking a lot of disbelief and what they’re being told they heard from that consult and so there’s this big disconnect between what people in Functional and Integrative Medicine are doing and what we and what people in let’s say traditional Primary Care, Allopathic Primary Care are doing and so the providers and functional integrative medicine at the Wellness Institute were looking for Primary Care docs who are like-minded and who would offer their patients an opportunity to work with a primary care doctor who didn’t make the patient feel less-than.
But something interesting started to happen as I started to share these patients with these integrative and functional medicine providers: I started to see people actually get better. It wasn’t just about managing chronic disease and keep keeping people trapped in this illness model, which is the healthcare system that we understand and work in in the United States but people started getting off of medications, started exercising at a higher level, they were truly achieving a higher quality of life.
And as I was sharing the medical record and seeing what the providers were doing and integrative and functional medicine, which really is just, you know, taking Primary Care to a higher level, honestly – is what all primary care doctors should be doing, in my opinion – I started recognizing, like this is something I could do and so I started picking the brains of these medical professionals and saying, “You know, I’m really interested in this. Would you teach me what you’re doing so that I could start to do this, as well?”
And so, for about the past two and a half years, I’ve really been blending Functional Medicine into what would be considered a Primary Care practice and one of the things that kind of drove me into the role of an administrator was, honestly a level of dissatisfaction in medicine.
I loved my patients and I found that when I would see patients in an office setting about 90% of an office visit was social: “Where did you go on vacation? How are your kids doing?” and patients liked it. I’m an easy guy to talk to. I’m friendly. I’m open. I give out my cell phone number, my email. You can contact me anytime, anywhere. I’ll answer you. It was it’s an interesting relationship that most patients don’t have with their doctor and so I really enjoy the social ability of the office setting but I wasn’t really moving the needle in any meaningful way and so I started moving more toward an administrator thinking that that was the direction that I needed to go in my practice but as I started to practice more functional medicine and started to see that my patients were improving because we were identifying root cause.
Interestingly enough, it was cell biology, physiology and biochemistry; the cornerstones of the first year of medical school that we just dismiss after we take our board exam. It’s like rote memorization: learn the Krebs Cycle, never see it again and I can’t believe in 2018, now I actually refer to the Krebs Cycle regularly. But the fact is that I began to finally see the correlation between what I was learning in medical school from 1988 to 1992 to the practice of medicine; something that I was really yearning for.
So, now we fast forward to 2017 in January – but first I must tell you something personal that happened to me in November I too was working for a healthcare organization that required a flu vaccine, however I was smart enough to recognize that I could take the preservative-free vaccine that didn’t contain Thimerosal and I would be fine.
So, I took the preservative free vaccine, as I was required to do to keep my job and within 12 hours – so this is November of 2016 – within 12 hours, I was sick in bed with fevers, chills muscle aches and was sick at home for the next 48 hours.
There were four other people in administration who took the shot on the same day the preservative free vaccine who had the exact same symptoms. So, when I got back to work and we were all commiserating on what had happened, I decided to look further into the vaccine and found out that even the preservative-free vaccine contains formaldehyde.
How can you freaking call a preservative-free vaxx – call it a preservative-free flu vaccine? Sorry, if you’re putting a preservative in it – like, this isn’t rocket science – people, this is sleight of hand. And so I got fired-up and then I decided to start looking into other issues associated with vaccination and I was listening to a podcast by Dr Paul Thomas who I feel is a hero in this story. If you don’t know Dr Paul Thomas he’s a pediatrician in Oregon and he wrote a book called the ‘Vaccine-Friendly Plan’.
Now, I can tell you that that I had this a-ha moment but think in your lives when you hear somebody speak or you read a book or you read an article and all of a sudden, the lights go on: the light bulb goes off you have this a-ha moment, where something just really resonates with you and in this podcast there were several things that Dr Thomas said that just really struck me at my very core.
The first one was when he was talking about the Hepatitis B vaccine and the fact that we’re injecting newborns on day one with a vaccine that contains 250 nanograms of aluminum.
I had absolutely no idea that was the case and I’m embarrassed to say that and actually what I’m most embarrassed about is the fact that I didn’t personally do my due diligence on vaccination. And as someone here who is speaking honestly to you, the public about what’s really going on in medicine, I am as culpable as any other medical professional, because I did not do my homework when it came to vaccination, so not recognizing that we were giving this high dose of aluminum on the very first day I had this a-ha moment personally, because I have children that have food allergies I have a child with celiac and it really struck me what have I done to my own family.
The second thing was that Dr Thomas that struck me with Dr Thomas’s statement was that when he developed the vaccine-friendly plan, it wasn’t that he was anti-vaxx, he was pro-patient and he wanted to make sure that he was not going to harm any patient who may be at risk, because of an inability to detoxify and that was the second thing that struck me was that we need to help recognize which patients are at risk for an inability to detoxify at birth versus those that aren’t and then take a step back as Dr Thomas has done to perhaps either delay or even avoid vaccination, altogether depending on that particular patient’s genetic risk.
In January of 2017, for my article for The Plain Dealer, this was the 37th article in the series, what I decided to do was take 2017 and make it the year of detoxification. I wanted to help patients identify where toxins are coming from in our environment and then provide them ways that they could better detoxify, because as we know in medicine the major contributors to chronic disease are, number one, inflammation, number two, deficiencies and critical vitamins and minerals that we all need for the billions of chemical reactions that are happening in our bodies every second and then finally, an inability to detoxify.
So, when you take inflammation, deficiencies and an inability to detoxify, those can be recipes for developing chronic disease. And so, in my role in wellness and education, I really wanted to help patients, not just in Northeast Ohio but anybody who was reading my articles, to really help them so that they could achieve a much higher quality of life.
Nothing was off the table in that article and so recognizing that we have mercury and aluminum in vaccines, amongst other preservatives that could potentially lead to chronic disease, I felt like it was important to discuss everything, including vaccines, so that patients could be their best advocate.
It’s not about whether I’m pro- or anti-vaccine. What I’m really about is Informed Consent and I want people to really understand what they’re doing when they are listening to both sides: the risks versus the benefits, before they make their own decision about about what to do for their lives or their children’s lives in that article I did discuss uh specifically about perhaps delaying the Hepatitis B vaccine until patients had a more mature immune system.
But the other thing that didn’t really make sense to me as a provider was when I would see a pregnant patient in my practice, I had the habit of discussing with them about avoiding tuna because we know that there’s high mercury in tuna in the United States or really all over the world and so we asked them to please abstain from eating tuna fish during your pregnancy, because of the potential exposure to mercury – but at the same time, I’m giving them a flu vaccine that contains mercury! Like, what am I doing? This doesn’t make sense to me.
Now, for people who are watching this or listening to this, I’ve been asked, ‘Well, two years earlier in your column, you wrote very strongly about advocating for the flu vaccine. I absolutely did listen, two years later the whole idea of continuing education is to learn and then to take those principles and adopt them into your practice.
And so, as I began to see and you know ,with my own eyes what was going on, I changed my point of view. You know, I’m not the same person at 30 that I am at 51. I’m not the same person two years ago that I am today, in the practice of medicine and I hope people realize that.
When that article came out, it was mind-boggling to say the least. If I can tell you the previous article that I wrote in December of 2016, which was about how to stay healthy during the holidays, it had a total of seven shares. I basically kind of thought that the Knitting Club of Twinsburg, Ohio was the only one reading these articles. The morning of January 7th when I got a phone call, saying that the article had been shared 25,000 times, overnight.
I said wow this is great dialogue is about to happen. This is exactly what I was looking for. Wow, was I wrong! What I found out was that I was stepping on a huge money trail that could potentially impact my employer and as a healthcare provider, I hope to think that I am being unbiased when it comes to financial or other secondary gain and the idea is to try to figure out how to keep people healthy and achieve the highest quality of life and that was my intention in writing that article.
In previous articles, I wrote about corruption in the sugar industry and how they paid off researchers at Harvard University in the 1960s to say that it was saturated fat that was the problem in the American diet, not carbohydrates and unfortunately, we went down the wrong rabbit hole.
I went after Big Pharma, the food industry and the tobacco industry, without any problems associated with my employer. As soon as I hit a nerve that impacted my healthcare organization financially, all Hell broke loose for me, personally. On January 13th, one week after the article came out, I was relieved of my administrative duties after being a loyal soldier for 20 years.
I was allowed to continue to practice clinically but essentially, my career at the Cleveland Clinic was over. In September, they dissolved my clinical area within the wellness Institute essentially, letting me know that at the end of the year, I had to find other work.
So these are my big issues regarding vaccines and these are the things that I’d like to highlight. Number one: there is no education in medical schools, that I am aware of and being an educator at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University, I am not aware of education around vaccines, their contents safety records, informed consent or the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
We do not discuss that in 1986, Congress enacted legislation removing all liability from pharma related to Vaccine Adverse Events. What are we taught about vaccines: we are taught to memorize the vaccine schedule.
Actually, I’m going to be sitting for my family medicine boards this year and I am sure that I will have to memorize that schedule again, in order to pass that exam. We don’t discuss that almost $4 billion with a B has been paid to vaccine-injured patients since 1992. For medical professionals, we expect fair balance but vaccines seem to be absolved from that consideration.
Number two: there appears to be a conflict of interest regarding payments to providers for completing vaccine schedules and corollary to that, which would be number three: patients are being dismissed from practices because of quote unquote “vaccine safety concerns”. If you bring up a question about a vaccine and you decide not to vaccinate your child, you may be at risk of being terminated from that practice. Absolutely deplorable and disgusting.
Number four: and again to the Bailey famil,y I’m really sorry but employers are forcing employees to receive the flu vaccine or face corrective action or job loss and the fact that your dad was six months from retiring is there’s a left.
Number five: there’s a lack of informed consent and I was one of those providers who didn’t provide safety sheets before vaccinating. I would tell the parents “These are the vaccines today. We’re going to give you three vaccines in one leg and two in the other.”
And then, after vaccinating either the child or the adult patient, here’s your information sheet and again, to be completely transparent with you: I had no idea that there was even a mention of the compensation program or a telephone number to call. Absolutely deplorable on my part and I apologize to my patients.
Number six: there’s a lack of transparency regarding vaccine complications – and worse, you’re being shamed as patients for suggesting that you were harmed by a vaccine. If I see a patient in the office and diagnosed strep throat and give them penicillin and either the mom or the patient themselves calls and tells me that they developed a rash, there is zero question the chart now states they have an allergy to penicillin and will never be given it again.
Why don’t we believe parents and patients when they tell us they have had an adverse event regarding a vaccine? It doesn’t make sense to me as a medical professional. I apologize for the being emotional.
Number seven – actually I don’t apologize – number seven [applause] why do the placebos and vaccine studies contain the adjuvants like mercury and aluminum? Aren’t placebos supposed to be inert? In other words, if you’re comparing, let’s say, the Hepatitis B vaccine against the placebo, why does the placebo contain a metal? If the concern could possibly be the metal, itself that’s triggering the autoimmunity that Dr Lyons Weiler had so eloquently spoke about.
Number eight: why has the rate of Autism Spectrum Disorder gone from one in a thousand in 1990, as I was taught, to 1 in 48 in 2017 and is there a link between the toxins in vaccines and the significant increase in the diagnosis, not only of ASD, we certainly know about is a risk of Guillain-Barré. But what about Attention Deficit Disorder, mood disorders in children and just the overall chronic disease epidemic in this country. I mean, we are a very sick population – and I’m not trying to be dramatic – but we’re currently spending three and a half trillion dollars on health care and what, honestly, folks are we getting for that?
We’re expected to see, right now, we’re at 18 of GDP is spent on healthcare, so basically, 18 cents on every dollar that we bring in is spent on healthcare. By 2040, that is expected to be 33%. I’ll repeat that: by 2040, in 22 years, we will spend 33% of our GDP on healthcare that makes it unsustainable in our country.
Why? Because 66% of every dollar that’s brought in or 66% of our GDP is already accounted for with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the VA. So, if we already have 66% accounted for and then 33% added to it with healthcare for the rest of us, what does that leave for education, defense, infrastructure?
You get the idea. The United States becomes unsustainable if we continue down this path. So let me focus just a few minutes on informed consent. I want to make sure that my patients and all patients are fully aware of risks versus the benefits but before undergoing any medical procedure – not just vaccination – nobody should have to undergo an irreversible medical procedure unless they agree to it and patients should not be dismissed from practices for choosing to decline a vaccine. That’s irresponsible on the part of the medical professionals.
We need to take care of all patients, not just select few that agree with our position than any medical concept employees should not have to receive a medical intervention in order to keep their job and the big question that I have is why are we not protected under the Geneva Convention?
After World War II – and we all recognize the atrocities that the Germans imposed on patients in concentration camps – the United States was one of the countries that agreed to the Geneva Convention, which stated that no human being should undergo a medical intervention without their consent.
So, to me, the idea of forcing a medical intervention on someone without their consent goes dramatically against the Geneva Convention and to me moves to the point that it’s an incredibly slippery slope, Folks.
Are women going to be forced to undergo a mammogram or a pap smear in order to keep their jobs? Are men going to be dismissed for medical practices because they refuse a digital rectal exam or a PSA for a prostate cancer screening or a colonoscopy, at age 50 for screening for colon cancer?
Where does it begin and where does it end? And where does just overall government and employer interference regarding our protections under the Constitution begin and end?
All medical professionals should be fighting as advocates for their patients, not just myself or people who are represented here. As a physician – and all physicians – we take the Hippocratic Oath and we say, “Primum Nihil Nocebit”, “First Do No Harm” – and not providing informed consent regarding a vaccine and then ultimately discovering patients had adverse reactions to that intervention is a direct violation of that oath.
There is much work to be done in this area, as Pharma is literally racing to provide us with more life-saving vaccines. Let me tell you friends, they are working on over 140 vaccines at this time. Beware. This is coming throughout 2017.
I received a tremendous outpouring of support from literally all over the world I just want to say thank you to everyone for helping me keep my chin up during a difficult year. My partner, Dr Jessica Hutchins, who is working with me at Inspire Wellness, my family, of course, Michelle from OAMF and Stephanie Dr Lyons Weiler have been in my corner and what I now realized that this has been the kick in the behind that I personally needed to get out from under a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, in order to really do the work that I feel needs to be done, both in educating the public and taking care of my patients that have any chronic disease but in the way that I really feel they need to be treated; not based on protocols and not under the thumb of a watchful eye telling me I must do this or do that or risk termination.
Please don’t feel sorry for me. I believe the universe is calling me to do a higher purpose and I will begin realizing that dream this coming Monday on January 15th when my new medical practice, Inspire Wellness opens in Beachwood, Ohio.
I will continue to fight for the rights of all patients, including the right to informed consent and along with that we must push to uncover the truths around vaccines the real safety and efficacy data – not the ones that either the government or Big Pharma wants us to see, that is really not the truth about what’s going on regarding their safety and efficacy.
And we must begin to truly understand the direct link, if there is one, that I do believe that occurs in at-risk populations for developing neuro-developmental disorders, like Guillain-Barré
that Mr Bailey suffered from autism spectrum disorder ADHD mood disorders as I spoke about but folks all chronic disease this is all on the table and we must keep our eyes and ears open and as I learned when I first stepped into the Wellness Institute be open to new ways of thinking and that’s what we all need to do in medicine moving forward I thank you for your time and good luck.