Transcript
Science Is Real And Vaccines Work with Dr. Jim Conway (Hour 2)
John & Gordy · Tue Jan 13, 2026
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That's John Peterson.
I'm Gordy Young, along with our producer, Aaron Zommers.
As we move into our second hour here, a little bit later on, in about a half hour, we'll talk to Dr. Jim Conway about vaccinations and the flu season, which is well underway in Wisconsin and much of the country, having a tough time with the flu this year.
Yeah,
Thanks so much.
That person was just terrific.
It was great to get that on the scene report.
A good talker, and I really appreciate the immediacy and the information that was there.
I have to admit that it's very difficult to keep my anger down when I think about this subject.
What's the price tag for this horse manure?
What's the price tag
for
rambling around, throwing people in prison without their proper warrants, without the proper backing?
What are we paying for this horse manure?
So these guys can get their rocks off.
I would suggest to you that since the time of Reagan, we have had laws on the books
where the employers of undocumented immigrants can at least receive fines and at maximum go to prison if they hire undocumented immigrants.
So there's a solution.
And I would suggest a place to start would be Wisconsin's dairy farms.
We've got 10,000 undocumented workers at least employed in our state's dairy industry, okay?
70% of the total labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms consistently has been undocumented immigrants.
So let's start in Red Wisconsin and going dairy farm to dairy farm and yanking the employer out and sending them to prison.
And you know what would come from that?
I'll tell you what would come from that.
An immigration bill.
We
would finally have an
immigration bill and we wouldn't be spending money on this horse manure of these guys.
creating these images and blabbering about blue cities.
Let's go to red Wisconsin and hit the dairy farms and take the, not the undocumented immigrants, it's not their fault they were hired.
It is the fault of the employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
And in Wisconsin, they are really screwed because the way it is now, it's difficult to make the numbers work when small farms are going up against these large mega farms without having undocumented immigrants.
Okay, stop with the horse manure.
get an immigration bill through.
We can't afford this cost.
We have many
of other things we need to spend our money in.
Let's start with health care instead of this.
Absolutely.
No, no, you're
That's a great grant and it sounds like something I've said to myself a thousand times as I'm walking around shopping.
Joe, thanks for that call.
I think about these things all the time and it really has to be a huge bill, right?
I think we brought it up the other day on the program.
Where is the money coming from for this and is anybody keeping track of how much we're spending on what this administration is trying to do?
to do with immigration.
We could have done a much better job if we just passed an immigration bill.
A reform bill.
There are numbers of ways we could take care of this problem.
Other countries have done it.
They found ways to do it.
We could steal a lot of their ideas, make our own reform bill, pass that, and not have to go through this hell.
Now they've turned from immigration to...
Americans.
That's the part that we all were kind of wondering about.
Well, how's that going to work out?
way.
Thanks guys.
And for a lot of these folks, they actually have documentation, but Trump is canceling their documentation on a dime.
That's a good point.
that one of the indictments against King George of England at the time they wrote the Declaration of Independence is that the colonists were complaining, and of course, you know, race played into it then as it does today, but they're complaining that the government was not allowing sensible immigration laws.
I mean, that's what we have here.
I mean, because, you know, Trump is now going after the East Africans and the Somalians and Ethiopians because he doesn't like
He apparently doesn't like brown people.
Well, brown people are people, and they add to our society, and it is just disgusting that this racism element has been added into all this stuff.
And how many of these people, if they're ISIS snatching up, actually have some kind of, they actually are documented individuals, but the ISIS just say, we're going to rough them up and decide they're not documented anymore, pull their documentation and ship them to points unknown.
You know, these concentration camps that they are setting up, you know, Jewel.
Right in the head.
I mean that these people are human beings I mean and if these these jokers acclaimed me the Christians and all this I mean that it's pretty clear in the Bible what Jesus said, you know, but how we're supposed to be treating our fellow man And it's not doing this crap.
I mean it is just beyond me that people are getting snatched in and I mean ice is breaking windows and dragging people out of their cars Yeah, how do we know it?
They don't know for sure that the person is illegal or not They're just pulling this stuff and there's nothing, you know
waving a gun in somebody's face, that is not a pleasant experience having a gun pointed at you.
I mean, it is, it is... Well, it's
You know, we can thank Justice Brett Kavanaugh for allowing racial profiling in this country.
It was illegal at one time.
The Supreme Court said, nah, you can do that now.
And that's why ice feels emboldened to do this kind of thing.
Mark, thanks for that call.
Just outrageous.
It's hard to even wrap your mind about what they're doing and how they're hurting people now.
They're just going out there.
I know going door to door was just one of the most shocking things to come out of Minneapolis.
Good afternoon to you, too.
I'm so happy you're in the afternoon.
I'm up and around by that time.
You guys have a great show, by the way.
I always love it when Joe calls in.
Always great information from her.
on it all the time.
think it was Steve Bannon said flood is on.
And at the present time, you can't even keep track of all the stuff that's going on
in
any one given day.
Everything from a ride to, you know, it's, it's, it's hard for even somebody like me to try to keep on top of things.
It just, it just jumped from one thing to the next.
So
I will say this with what, well, there's a lot of things that, um,
Bother me about ice, but the one thing that should not be allowed for sure is to have massed over your face
Yes, I mean
that's that's just common sense.
You don't know who's stopping you if he does something on the hood is it The whole thing is out of control not even law enforcement anymore.
So hey, you guys keep up the good work.
I appreciate you Sean
Just happier on the afternoon again.
where I start to function.
All
Good
Good afternoon, guys.
Instead of spending all this money on these thugs, why don't we go back to like the 1880s and we had immigration coming in from all over the place and spend that money on making a
Ellis Island in Dallas or someplace even This is
crazy.
This
yeah, the black yeah,
got it.
They've
well i you know the democrats have promised that if they get in control again they are going to stop the masking
That's one thing, and then, of course, you have to show some kind of search warrant or an administrative warrant of some sort that passes out.
You have to show that, and you just can't break into people's homes, and you can't just drag them out without having some cause.
There's a cut about the difference between judicial warrants and administrative warrants.
It's one of the cuts that I sent you, I think, earlier today, Aaron.
Maybe we will do a little search on that.
We can go back to the phones here.
Yeah.
Todd or Billy is on the line.
All right.
Todd or Billy, which one are you today?
As
OK.
Or either.
And I relate to the next caller in terms of being overwhelmed and just so much.
happening that it's hard to keep track of and one thing that I think is maybe a good idea for us and one thing I'm doing is just constantly making phone calls to my elected representatives about release the Epstein files.
You know I don't know that
that's more important necessarily than taking over another country or mass agents shooting people in the street.
But it does seem like it's really something that is going to have an impact and that reaches into the priorities of people on the other side of the aisle, something they care about.
So I just want to...
You know, when I know there's anything else to do, I keep the pressure on about the Epstein files.
We're, uh, we're not talking about that anymore.
I know, but, uh, this is also affecting a lot of Americans in Minneapolis and Minnesota and all across the country.
I mean, now we're experiencing very close to home here.
So it is definitely affecting us.
And, uh, we're, you know, frightened basically.
You know, I had this weird.
thought yesterday of being in a John Wick movie and having all the arms that he normally carries with him and battling ice.
And that is not me.
I don't think like that.
I don't want to go into a room where I'm shooting everyone in sight.
That's a John Wick movie.
And I've told you this.
I feel sorry for every one of the people killed by John Wick.
because they've got families, these are sons, fathers, who knows who they are, right?
Remember,
I know it's a movie, but still, you know, we just act like, oh, well, you know, just kill them, kill them.
No, these are people with lives.
They've grown up to this point in life, and we're just doing away with them.
So, yeah, for me to have that kind of thought, I, you know, this is wrong.
This is pushing me to that hedge.
Oh, man.
So relax.
Well, yeah, you know, I mean, you're gonna have
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Oh really called
iron.
Yeah
although
Let's talk about the first thing you are going to do when somebody knocks on your door and says they demand entry to your house.
You're not going to say, sure, come on in.
You're not going to open the door.
You're not even going to go call your lawyer.
You are going to say the words, I need to see a warrant.
And then they're going to say, well, sure, if you just open up the door, I'll show you the warrant.
Do not fall for that.
Tell them they can slide it under the door.
They can press it against the window or some other way.
Once you are able to view the warrant, these are the three things you're going to look for.
Number one, you're going to look for words at the top that say United States District Court.
You're going to look for the word court.
C-O-U-R-T.
at the top of this document.
It can be from any state, district within that state, but it needs to say the word court.
Second thing you're going to look for is a signature right here.
You see here Brian D. Karth, clerk of
Court, C-O-U-R-T.
There's that word again.
Now here you can have either the signature of a judge, sometimes a magistrate judge, or you can have a signature of a representative of that judge, which would be the clerk of court.
Third thing you're going to look for right here.
You are hereby commanded to arrest.
See that over there?
That better be your name.
and it better be spelled correctly.
Now this is an example of an ICE warrant or an administrative warrant.
Let's look for the three things we talked about.
Number one, is there a reference to a court anywhere at the top of the document?
No, no, there isn't.
What it actually says is the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security.
That's not court.
This is not a judicial warrant.
Let's look at the signature.
Is there a signature here by a judge, a magistrate judge, or a deputy clerk of that court?
No, it says immigration officer.
Immigration officer is not a judge.
Immigration officer does
not have any authority to make a fourth amendment ruling on whether or not your constitutional rights are being violated.
Even if this document says warrant, even if this document has a signature and even if this document correctly spells your name, this is not a judicial warrant.
What does that mean?
That means that if all they got
is an administrative warrant, and when they slide that under your door and you look for it and you say, hmm, this document doesn't reference a court.
Hmm, this document doesn't have a signature of a judge, a magistrate judge, or a court clerk.
Hmm, this document actually doesn't spell my name right.
The words that you are going to say are these.
You do not have my consent to enter the premises.
After that is when you call a lawyer.
So there you go.
I don't think they listen to that.
I don't think they care.
No, we have not right now.
We haven't seen them ask any of those questions.
But we'll... Now that we're armed a little bit with the information, at least we can feel better that...
when we talk and when we tell them we're not going to open our car door or let him in the house, at least we know that we have some reason for it.
And that if something does happen, you are in the right if it goes to
yeah.
I mean, they
Why are we leaving this kind of trauma on people in this country?
I mean, just watching it as a trauma all by itself.
I got to pass this along to you.
Ice told.
To step in front of a car to use deadly force.
This is this is real something to think about when you're dealing with eyes, especially The veteran type the older ice agents out there.
They've been trained on this.
Let's listen to cut 189.
All right Quick I
asked if someone could find the report and they did what are we talking about the internal report produced by customs?
and Border Patrol, which stated that U.S.
Border agents were intentionally stepping in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at them.
This article came out in 2014.
It was based on a report that I couldn't find, but fortunately, someone else found it for me, my good friend, Victoria.
And here is the report from CBP.
And right here on page eight, they found that Border Patrol agents were intentionally stepping in front of vehicles two.
create justification to shoot the people inside.
Most reviewed cases involved nonviolent suspects who posed no threat, other than a moving vehicle.
It states they were doing this out of frustration.
Once again, Jonathan Ross, the man who shot the woman in Minneapolis, was a part of CBP during those years.
He was there when that was happening.
I will leave a link.
to that in the comments so you can read it for yourself.
together.
All the side effects mean it's working.
I mean, that's the whole idea is that you're trying to get your immune system into
thinking it actually had the illness without having to go through all the side effects of the illness.
I mean, imagine how much worse it is if you got COVID and flu.
disease together, you know, ask a case.
And as a guy, you'd be whining about it until tomorrow.
So
I was
Guys,
That's no doubt.
to
since the holiday season and as we predicted the immunization rates were down unfortunately as we were going through November into early December and so as people went out and traveled and unfortunately started hugging and kissing everybody that they hadn't seen in a while we get the perfect storm of transmission and so you know we do have
quite a bit of disease and sort of stabilized as people have actually responded and been getting vaccines more readily over the last couple of weeks like you, you know, we do seem to at least be leveling off, but emergency rooms, urgent care centers and hospitals are pretty full of pretty sick people, mostly the unimmunized.
want to
vaccines, I'll push back a little bit.
Most of them have really been engineered now where there's only really just pieces of organisms that are used.
We've gotten away from what many of us
that are kind of on the older side grew up with was literally a whole piece of the virus or a whole piece of a bacteria got ground up and sterilized and made into a vaccine.
The engineering and the technology over the last 23, 30 years has been really remarkable in making these vaccines, just the pieces that our immune system needs to see.
And that's one of the reasons that side effects are actually much better than they used to be overall.
Yeah, so the original shingles vaccine was called Zostavax, and that was sort of a live, really whole virus of the varicella, you know, the chickenpox virus.
But shingrix is, again, just pieces of it.
And what they've done there is they have adjuvants that really help turn on the immune system in a really novel way that's been remarkable as far as the benefit of that vaccine.
I don't know if you saw those studies that came out of Wales last year
that showed that getting a shingles vaccine actually decreases rates of dementia.
That's right.
Yeah.
One of the concerns is that there was this like subclinical reawakening of those chickenpox viruses at low levels that were actually bugging people's brains.
And by giving those vaccines, we've actually seen decreasing rates of dementia.
So sometimes the secondary benefits are really remarkable.
Yeah, so one of the ideas is if you're going to go to the trouble of getting a vaccine,
you might as well get the full benefit of actually getting a decent response to it.
And so for many years, it's been known that if you put in just a tiny, tiny bit, I mean, literally microscopic amounts of some various salt products, that's enough to stimulate those immune cells to develop a better immune response.
And so, you know, they're present in really the majority of these vaccines.
I mean, these kinds of salts are everywhere and everything we eat and everything we're around.
They're not particularly interesting to most of us, but they are extraordinarily helpful when you're trying to get your immune system to be trained to do what you want it to do.
I mean, you basically be making these vaccines kind of a wimpy version of the vaccine and not get the full bang for the buck.
So it seems like a why bother if you're going to do that.
All
Yeah, obviously, since RFK Junior and HHS issued this guidance that what they were basically saying was that the 17 routine diseases that we've been protecting kids against
for many years that they were going to create two tiers one group the ones that were kind of the old school ones will continue to vaccinate routinely but six of those they were going to make essentially into what's called shared clinical decision making where people kind of get to make their own decision with their provider and it really was going to be depriving a lot of people of a clear recommendation that these are still valuable vaccines that them and their
kids are going to benefit from.
So many states, Illinois, New York, a lot of more and more states are basically coming out and saying these changes were not made for any kind of scientific reason.
There isn't any new data that says this is a good idea.
This was, you know, purely sort of an emotional decision that somebody made.
And so are endorsing what we've had all along, which is professional societies making recommendations to the CDC and then them generally endorsing those.
And those professional societies haven't changed their
recommendations at all.
The American Academy of Pediatrics still strongly recommends every kid get an opportunity to be protected against these 17 diseases, some of which could disable or kill them, some of which are just terrible things to suffer from if you don't have to go through it and keep you in school and keep parents at work and keep life normal.
So we've really doubled down and just endorsed this should be continuing to be business as usual for all the kids in our region.
Well, here's the thing though,
We've got guarantees from both Illinois and Wisconsin Medicaid that they'll continue to cover and all of the major insurers that they have no interest in stopping vaccines because talk about an economic benefit.
Yeah, vaccinating prevents disease diseases costing money that they have to care for.
So put the money in the prevention bucket.
Well, Denmark's interesting.
I mean, it's always been a bit of an outlier in the European Union as far as the number of vaccines they've endorsed, you know, while most countries have continued to gradually add vaccines that
or diseases that don't necessarily kill you, but are really terrible to go through.
You know, things like chickenpox or rotavirus, you know, the diarrhea that used to admit 70,000 kids a year in the United States to the hospital because of inability to keep up with the vomiting and diarrhea.
Denmark has been an outlier and made a decision not to add those kinds of vaccines.
You know, they've got a national healthcare system.
It's easy to get in and get seen.
And so they had
kind of been an outlier.
And unfortunately, that's the country that somebody decided to mimic.
But if you look at the most of the other countries in Europe, you know, Scandinavia and Western Europe, you know, Germany has 16 vaccines.
You know, we have 17.
But most of the European Union are kind of on board with where we are in North America.
Denmark was sort of an unusual choice because they're really kind of an outlier.
Yeah.
Hey, Doctor, I appreciate you taking my call.
Hey, as a kid, I grew up with shingles.
I would have outbreaks on only half the nerve endings in my face.
And it was, you know, the blisters and all that.
And we discovered a technique of...
When I was at home my mom threw a bunch spoon in the freezer and we would just say I take out a spoon and hold it on the inflammatory nerves and it got to the point where if I felt one coming on I could use spoons and the blisters would never appear Now I'm wondering is that the same type of shingles?
that people are getting in their old age, and if so, because I had breakouts as a kid, would that vaccine help me or not?
Good
question.
Yeah.
Yeah, great question.
So, you know, what shingles is, it's the original chicken pox that most of us had when we were a little kid.
And chicken pox, even after you get over it, is a virus that continues to live in the nerves.
It lives in a part of the
nerve called the anterior motor neuron and it basically just kind of sits there.
Your immune system when you're kind of healthy and young usually can kind of keep track of those things and keep an eye on them but every once in a while if it gets distracted it loses the ability to keep it in what we call latency in other words keeping it suppressed and so it can wake up usually creeps down the nerve and that's why when people get shingles they get sort of a ribbon or a band of
of pain.
Occasionally there are people that even that are younger that can sometimes have more trouble keeping the shingles suppressed.
And so, you know, originally these vaccines came out for the older individuals, but gradually we've seen that there's benefit to younger and younger people.
So I would absolutely say that if you're a person who gets recurrent shingles, you would very strongly benefit from getting a vaccine that would give your immune system a little bit of a reminder and a little bit of a nudge to do a better job keeping that stuff suppressed.
for
Yeah, unfortunately, I hate to be honest with you, but it is one of the vaccines that comes with some substantial side effects.
And the reason is because, you know, since the vast majority of us had chickenpox when we were kids,
you've already got some immunity and so to get your immune system to realize like oh yeah I need to actually do something about this it really needs a pretty brisk kick in the shorts and so that's where shingricks with a particularly strong adjuvant to really turn on your immune system
has to go.
The original version called Zostavax was okay, but it just didn't give you enough of a kick.
And so shingrix is really an improvement on that.
So it is one of those things, you know, I do recommend that you give yourself a day or two after you get it.
And it's two doses and you really do want to get both doses.
So yeah, even more more happiness, but it is well worth it.
If you know anybody that's ever had full blown shingles, I
I had the pain and the tingling that
persist, what's called the post-tropetic neuralgia.
Neuralgia basically means my nerves are so angry they want to jump off a bridge.
The shingles vaccine is well worth
Oh, absolutely not.
Quite the opposite.
It actually, you know, again, you know, highly motivated people are people who have ever had shingles.
Our hope is that we can get people to all get this vaccine routinely once they turn 50.
And nobody have to deal with shingles because shingles can be pretty debilitating for quite a few people.
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Yeah, they're starting to gradually go up now.
You know, flu is still dominating in the respiratory viruses at this point.
You know, most of the flu is this AH3N2 strain that you're hearing about this K-clade.
We are starting to see flu B as well show up.
And then there's also some H1N1.
So we've got kind of three different
flues that are around.
And then behind that, we're starting to see some COVID pick up again as people have come back from travel.
RSV is the other big one this time of year.
That hasn't really reared its head quite yet.
That usually kind of shows up end of January, February.
So what all that means is that there's actually still plenty of time and plenty of benefit for people getting vaccines against these things because, you know, there's still plenty of respiratory season ahead of us.
And all of these viruses, honestly, remain very unpredictable.
So for people that put it off or kind of forgot or didn't think it was worthwhile, I still think there's plenty of benefit for people to getting any of those vaccines or all of them before we get into the heat of this.
No, I mean, at this point, as long as you got one of the newer versions, so they were basically still offering one version of the vaccine up until, you know, kind of early to mid August, and then flipped into kind of the new strain vaccine came out in early September.
There was a lot of confusion and delays getting that going, as you may remember, because
HHS and RFK Junior and those folks, you know, didn't clearly endorse it in the beginning and
so
there was a little bit of a wait.
So a lot of people kind of missed out, but if you got a dose of the new one and you're an otherwise healthy person, you're probably pretty good.
You know, we continue to think that for very high-risk people, you know, the older folks, people with immune compromising conditions, that COVID probably still deserves two doses.
So one in the fall and then another one as we get towards spring because
what we've seen each year is that there's a little flurry of COVID activity midwinter, but there's also activity in late summer as we saw this past summer.
And it turns out that it's basically, you know, once the weather changes and people close the windows, whether it's closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning or closing the windows and turn on the heat, that that indoor circulation is where people have a lot higher risk of getting exposed.
So for high risk people, two doses of COVID spread out over the year are probably a good idea.
Yeah, it makes me sad too, because, you know, it's understandable.
I mean,
the pandemic hit and you know everybody for good reason felt like they had to try to get up to speed and learn and become an expert in all these things and you know I think a fair number of people you know tried to do their own research but you know it was a disease we didn't know a lot about and had to learn about as well as developing vaccines at the same time people have always had questions about vaccines but I don't know that we did a great job
from the public health side, really educating people and helping them understand the importance of these things.
And so you're right, it led to people feeling comfortable with skepticism, but it's unfortunate that that's then led to, unfortunately, millions of people missing out on the opportunity to be protected against these things, and it has leaked over into other vaccines as well.
I think people need to remember, vaccines are safe, vaccines are effective, and the process they go through for development and for regulatory approval
is far greater than any other drugs that are out there.
You know, vaccines are really held to a different standard.
And I do think even in this current era, people need to understand and trust that these are the best things they can do for themselves and their families to keep themselves healthy and stave off these unpredictable outcomes.
Thank you.
Yes.
First of all, you can't trust anything at all that's coming out of this so-called health and human services department.
I mean, the guy running with this, the worm has definitely taken his brain or something.
Second thing I'm going to say is this whole thing is more divide and conquer.
And besides that, it's going to kill people.
It already has.
We've had measles deaths that measles was supposedly eliminated in 2000.
And finally, if you're not sure about some of this stuff, find a healthcare professional you trust completely.
Your family doctor, physician assistant,
even
a qualified nurse.
Yeah, any of those people will be able to give you Extremely good advice on things like this.
That's
right.
All
Jack.
Well said really really really well said and I agree with you 100% I mean the best people to talk to are the people that know you and your family and Absolutely almost any health professional can really help with these things I think one other thing quickly is that you know, we do have to remember although we think of it as one big country.
We're really 52, you know
separate places and your local health departments and your state health departments in most areas are really the best people that know what's best for our communities.
Similarly, the professional medical societies are the ones that really should be passing down recommendations.
And so while we've gotten comfortable that for many years, ACIP and CDC and HHS were led by health professionals, as soon as you put a non-health professional in charge of those things, they become a different entity.
Jack, you're here and thanks for your comments.
Yeah, I gotta be careful with those things.
again soon.
for having me.
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