The Experience Miracles Podcast

The Studies They Didn’t Want You To See: Are Vaccinated or Unvaccinated Children Healthier? w/ Del Bigtree

Jan 20, 2026

Why Some Kids React to Vaccines and Others Don’t: Root Cause Conversation with Del Bigtree

Episode 175, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: January 16, 2026 | Duration: ~80 min

Guest: Del Bigtree, Founder & CEO, Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN); Host, The Highwire; Former Emmy-winning CBS producer; Executive Producer, An Inconvenient Study

Key Takeaways

  • Nervous system health determines vaccine response: Children whose autonomic nervous systems are already dysregulated from birth trauma or prenatal stress have compromised detoxification and elevated inflammation, making them more vulnerable to adverse vaccine reactions than children with a well-regulated nervous system.
  • 80–90% of children with autism diagnoses had documented birth interventions, forceps, vacuum extraction, C-sections, or cord complications, that caused brainstem and vagus nerve dysfunction, setting off The Perfect Storm before any vaccine exposure occurred.
  • The Hepatitis B vaccine given on day one of life was safety-tested on just 147 children with a five-day follow-up and no placebo group, a trial standard that Del Bigtree argues no other approved drug in the U.S. has ever relied upon.
  • Autism appears to be a brain injury, not a disease: an inflammatory cascade, potentially triggered by vaccines in children who cannot methylate aluminum and other toxins fast enough, causes brain swelling (encephalitis is listed as a side effect in most vaccine package inserts), and the severity of that swelling determines the outcome.
  • Colic, chronic constipation, and eczema in infancy are often early signs of nervous system dysregulation; children told they would “grow out of it” frequently grew into sensory processing disorder, ADHD, and autism instead.

Why Does One Child React to Vaccines While Another Does Not?

Nervous system regulation, not genetics alone, is the central variable determining how a child handles any environmental input, including vaccines. Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, has spent 15 years documenting that children who arrive at their first vaccine appointments already carrying the neurological burden of The Perfect Storm, prenatal maternal stress, birth trauma, and early toxic load, have a fundamentally different physiological starting point than children whose nervous systems developed without those disruptions.

When the nervous system is stuck in Sympathetic Dominance (fight-or-flight mode), two things happen that are directly relevant to vaccine response: the gut shuts down, slowing elimination and detoxification, and the immune system is primed for chronic inflammation. Del Bigtree builds on this by explaining that autism specifically involves an impaired methylation pathway, children who cannot detoxify aluminum and other environmental toxins fast enough are vulnerable to tipping into a brain swelling event when a vaccine triggers an inflammatory response. Because MTHFR gene variants reduce detoxification speed, children born with this predisposition into an already-toxic environment face compounding risk.

For parents navigating this conversation, the framework is not that vaccines cause harm to every child. It’s that a child whose vagus nerve was compromised at birth, whose brainstem function is altered, and whose detoxification pathways are already taxed by in-utero aluminum exposure and prenatal stress is in a different risk category entirely, and that category is largely invisible to pediatricians who have received, as a WHO chief psychologist confirmed in 2019, less than half a day of vaccine safety training in medical school.

Why Nervous System Health Must Come First in the Vaccine Conversation [00:00:00 – 00:08:59]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: For two years, the Experience Miracles podcast intentionally stayed out of the vaccine conversation, not to avoid it, but to build the foundational context first. The most important missing piece in virtually every vaccine safety discussion is the role of the nervous system in determining how a child responds to any environmental stressor, inhaled, ingested, or injected.

Before asking whether a vaccine is safe, you have to ask: safe for whom? A child with a well-regulated nervous system, functioning detoxification pathways, and no birth trauma history is a fundamentally different biological subject than a child whose autonomic nervous system never fully came online after a complicated delivery.

That’s why this conversation with Del Bigtree begins with the nervous system. Buckle up, as Dr. Tony puts it, but understand that the nervous system is the lens you need to make sense of everything else that follows.

“For two years we just didn’t shut up about the nervous system because no one else is having that conversation.”

Del Bigtree is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), director of communications for Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, and host of thehighwire.com, which has surpassed 400 million views worldwide. He is a former Emmy-winning producer of CBS’s The Doctors and executive producer of the documentary An Inconvenient Study. On behalf of American citizens, ICAN has filed over 1,000 FOIA requests and won multiple lawsuits against the HHS, NIH, FDA, and CDC, including the case that forced the release of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine trial data the FDA had attempted to seal for 75 years.

Why Some Kids React to Vaccines and Others Don’t [00:09:00 – 00:17:59]

Del Bigtree: The easiest way to understand differential vaccine response is through the lens of autism, the one injury vaccine proponents claim to have studied most thoroughly, and therefore the most revealing when you examine the actual science.

Autism appears to be fundamentally a detoxification failure. Children who cannot methylate properly, who cannot clear aluminum and other toxins fast enough for the load they’re carrying, tip into an inflammatory cascade when exposed to a vaccine adjuvant. The Hepatitis B vaccine, until recently recommended on day one of life, contains 250 micrograms of aluminum. The FDA’s own maximum oral dose guidance for infants is 25 micrograms. That’s ten times the tolerable oral dose, injected directly into the bloodstream of a baby who may already be aluminum-toxic from the mother.

“Autism is where that inflammatory event makes it to the brain. And if you look at the insert of most vaccines, encephalitis and encephalopathy is listed as a side effect, meaning a brain swelling event.”

Bigtree frames autism not as a disease but as a symptom of injury, specifically, a brain injury caused by inflammation. “Did it cause Tourette’s? Did it cause autism? Did it cause something much lighter like ADHD? This is what we’re looking at.” The MTHFR gene variant, particularly a double mutation inherited from both parents, appears to predispose children to this detoxification bottleneck, not because autism is genetic per se, but because the inability to detoxify fast enough becomes dangerous in a toxic environment.

Dr. Tony Ebel: When you open the neurophysiology of autism, you see every system in disarray, the nervous system, immune system, gut motility, endocrine function, motor system. That’s because all of those systems are governed by the nervous system. The nervous system is the root. And when it’s compromised, the detoxification conversation, the vaccine conversation, the gut conversation, they all follow from that root.

The Perfect Storm: Birth Trauma, Prenatal Stress, and Toxic Load [00:23:00 – 00:28:59]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The path to this understanding began with case histories. Taking a consult history not from diagnosis forward, but all the way back to fertility, pregnancy, and labor and delivery, that’s where the pattern revealed itself.

In approximately 60% of autism cases (now higher, as medicalization of pregnancy increases), the mother had significant nervous system stress during pregnancy. Her nervous system is the baby’s nervous system developing in utero. Prenatal stress shifts the developing fetal nervous system toward sympathetic dominance before the child is even born.

Then came the finding that changed everything. When asking about birth: 80 to 85% of the time, now over 90% in autism, PANS/PANDAS, and epilepsy cases, there was a documented birth intervention. C-section. Forceps. Vacuum extraction. Induction. Cord wrapped. Breech. These physical birth events create compression and torsion at the upper cervical spine and brainstem, the control center for the autonomic nervous system. That’s birth trauma, and it dysregulates the entire downstream system before a single vaccine is ever given.

“None of these kids grew out of colic and constipation and eczema. They were growing into sensory, ADHD, and autism. The neurophysiology underneath colic is not all that different than underneath autism.”

When the nervous system is already in sympathetic dominance from birth trauma, vaccination doesn’t happen in a healthy biological context. Gut motility is impaired, so elimination is slow. The immune system is primed for chronic inflammation, so a vaccine’s intended inflammatory event can escalate. Detoxification pathways are taxed, so aluminum and adjuvants accumulate rather than clear. The vaccine becomes not the first insult, but the last straw.

The Hepatitis B Scandal: 147 Children, Five Days, No Placebo [00:28:59 – 00:37:59]

Del Bigtree: The most direct action parents can take right now is to read the vaccine package inserts themselves. Go to any search engine, type “FDA licensed vaccines,” pull up the CDC childhood recommended vaccine schedule, then click through to find the package insert for each vaccine. Navigate to Section 6.1, that is the evidence the FDA relied upon to approve that vaccine as safe.

For Recombivax HB (the Hepatitis B vaccine recommended until recently on day one of life), Section 6.1 will show you that the safety trial enrolled 147 children and followed them for five days after each dose. There was no placebo group.

Dr. Tony Ebel: 147 subjects. No placebo. Five-day follow-up for a vaccine whose alleged injuries, autoimmune conditions, neurodevelopmental disorders, take years to manifest. And this was deemed adequate to mandate this vaccine for every infant born in the United States.

Del Bigtree: “Safe and effective” is a slogan. The pharmaceutical industry is the largest lobby in Washington, outspending oil and gas two to one. It owns 60–70% of television advertising revenue, count the commercials during any news broadcast if you doubt it. That advertising relationship is why your news anchor has never told you what’s in Section 6.1.

Every single day, I challenge journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post: if placebo trials exist, put them on the front page and end this forever. They haven’t. Because the trials don’t exist.

“Safe and effective is a slogan. It has nothing to do with science.”

The Pediatrician Paradox: Why Kick Out the Unvaccinated Child? [00:43:00 – 00:50:59]

Dr. Tony Ebel: There is a revealing contradiction at the center of the conventional pediatrician’s position on vaccine refusal. If vaccines are the foundation of good health, and if an unvaccinated child is consequently at the highest health risk in your community, why would you refuse to care for that child? The pediatrician who kicks a family out of the practice for declining vaccines is effectively abandoning the patient they claim most needs protection.

At PX Docs, the philosophy is the opposite: everybody is welcome, and the more the conventional medical system has failed a child, the more urgently that child needs a different approach.

Del Bigtree: A WHO meeting in 2019, just before the pandemic, included a speech by the WHO’s chief psychologist on vaccine hesitancy. Her candid statement to hundreds of assembled scientists: the biggest problem isn’t parents. It’s that doctors are becoming hesitant because they barely received half a day of vaccine education in medical school. “We have a wobbly front line,” she said. Doctors are trained in the mechanism of injection, not in the science of safety. When parents ask hard questions, the system’s trained response is confrontation, not engagement, and when confrontation fails, expulsion from the practice.

The vaccine schedule has gone from 10 vaccines in the 1980s to 72 today, approaching 100 by age 18. In that same period, the rate of childhood chronic illness went from 12% to over 54%. Del’s conclusion: these doctors’ excuses for not seeking out this information themselves have expired.

The MAHA Movement, RFK Jr., and What Happened in the Oval Office [00:51:00 – 01:05:59]

Del Bigtree: In 2020, before the election, Del met with Robert Kennedy Jr. in a presidential suite in Washington, along with attorney Aaron Siri of ICAN, and told him directly: run for president. The idea was that Kennedy’s platform was uncensorable as a presidential candidate, and that it might just win. Kennedy considered it, then declined, saying the timing wasn’t right.

When Kennedy did decide to run, he called Del first. Del became his director of communications. The campaign obtained ballot access in all 50 states, something considered impossible under the post-Perot rules requiring millions of signatures. After CNN denied Kennedy access to the debates, and after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Kennedy reached out to Trump out of shared human concern. That conversation began a collaboration.

I was in the Oval Office, Del says, when Kennedy put his hand on that Bible and was sworn in. It was beyond anything I had imagined. Which means we are underestimating what is possible when we get up every day and ask what God is calling us to do.

“This is so much bigger than anything I dreamed. This is literally beyond our wildest dreams, which means we are underestimating what we are actually capable of.”

Dr. Tony Ebel: That story, from the presidential suite meeting in 2020 to the Oval Office in 2025, is the arc of what this movement is. PX Docs has lived the same arc in miniature: relentless, sometimes grinding, sometimes looking like the tires were spinning in the mud. And then a year where it all starts to lock in.

An Inconvenient Study: The Pro-Vaccine Researcher’s Confession [01:07:00 – 01:13:59]

Del Bigtree: In 2016, Del sat down at dinner with Dr. Marcus Zervos, head of infectious disease at Henry Ford Health, one of the largest research databases in the world. Zervos told Del that Del’s claims about the absence of placebo vaccine trials had offended him, so he had gone to verify they were wrong. He came back with a different message: “I sat on the biggest database in the world. I cannot believe we’ve never done a placebo trial. Everyone knows it.”

Dr. Zervos agreed to do the study, a comparison of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Del spent four years following up. By 2020, the results were in. And Zervos refused to publish. His explanation: “It’ll be the end of my career. It’s worse than anything I can imagine. I keep dicing this every way sideways and I keep getting the same result.”

By 2022, Del arranged dinner with Zervos in Detroit, and brought hidden recording equipment. What was captured on film became the heart of An Inconvenient Study: a researcher who proclaims himself pro-vaccine, who is personally responsible for mandatory vaccination at his own institution, telling the camera that this study “is important, people should see it,” that he’s “too afraid to publish it,” and that he is “not a good person.”

The film is available to watch free at AnInconvenientStudy.com. Del describes it as past 70 million views worldwide and moving toward 100 million.

Dr. Tony Ebel: If you already know this territory, watch it for the tool it gives you to change someone else’s mind. Parents are telling Del: I couldn’t get my father to listen to me, but I got him to watch this film and it changed his life. That’s what the film is capable of.

What’s Next: ICAN Lawsuits, Medical Freedom, and the Fight in West Virginia [01:14:00 – 01:20:00]

Del Bigtree: ICAN’s legal work is the engine of the movement. Attorney Aaron Siri recently appeared before the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC, delivering an hour-long dissertation on what ICAN’s lawsuit discoveries have revealed about vaccine safety testing gaps. The committee debated, possibly for the first time in modern history, whether the Hepatitis B vaccine should be given to babies when 99.95% of American mothers are Hepatitis B-negative.

Three years ago, ICAN won back Mississippi’s religious vaccine exemption, which had been stripped for over 30 years. Two weeks before recording, ICAN won a three-year legal battle restoring West Virginia’s religious exemption for school vaccination. That decision has been immediately appealed, the ACLU and multiple funded entities are fighting to stay it, and hundreds of children are currently being blocked from school while the case works through the appellate court.

ICAN believes a case handled by Aaron Siri’s firm will reach the Supreme Court of the United States and become precedent-setting for medical freedom. To support that work: ICANdecide.org and thehighwire.com.

“If you do not control what goes into your body, or what goes into the body of your children, you are not a free citizen.”

Dr. Tony Ebel: The families in our community, hundreds of thousands of parents who have been fighting this fight while it felt like they were getting nowhere, can feel the traction now. The movement is real. The doors are opening. God’s got this. Keep going.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some children have adverse reactions to vaccines while others don’t?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, the key variable is the health of the child’s nervous system at the time of vaccination. Children whose autonomic nervous systems are already dysregulated from birth trauma, prenatal stress, or early toxic exposure have impaired detoxification, compromised gut motility, and chronically elevated inflammation. This leaves them less able to handle the additional inflammatory and toxic burden of vaccines. Children without these prior nervous system insults typically respond very differently to the same vaccine schedule.

Is there a connection between birth trauma and autism?

Dr. Tony Ebel found that over 80–90% of children presenting with autism had documented birth interventions, C-sections, forceps, vacuum extraction, cord complications, or induced labor. These interventions create compression at the upper cervical spine and brainstem, disrupting vagus nerve function and pushing the developing nervous system into Sympathetic Dominance before any vaccine exposure. This is the foundation of The Perfect Storm: the nervous system dysregulation that sets the stage for subsequent inflammatory triggers to cause outsized harm.

What is the Hepatitis B vaccine safety scandal Del Bigtree describes?

Del Bigtree explains that the FDA’s approval of the Hepatitis B vaccine, formerly recommended on day one of life, rested on a trial involving only 147 children with a five-day follow-up period and no placebo group. Parents can verify this directly by searching “Recombivax HB package insert” and reading Section 6.1. Bigtree and ICAN have challenged journalists to produce contrary evidence for years; none has been produced, because no such trials exist.

What is An Inconvenient Study and where can I watch it?

An Inconvenient Study is a documentary produced by Del Bigtree featuring secretly recorded footage of Dr. Marcus Zervos, head of infectious disease at Henry Ford Health, confirming that a vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparison study he conducted produced results so damaging to the vaccine program that he refused to publish them. He can be seen on camera saying he is “not a good person” for withholding the data. The film is available free at AnInconvenientStudy.com and has surpassed 70 million views worldwide.

What is ICAN and how can parents support its work?

ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network) is a nonprofit founded by Del Bigtree that uses legal action, FOIA requests, and media to expose gaps in vaccine safety science. ICAN has won cases against the HHS, NIH, FDA, and CDC, including forcing release of Pfizer’s COVID trial data. Current priorities include a West Virginia religious exemption case and a case expected to reach the Supreme Court. Parents can donate and follow the work at ICANdecide.org and thehighwire.com.

Can a chiropractor help a child who may have had an adverse vaccine reaction?

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, as practiced in PX Docs offices, addresses the underlying nervous system dysregulation that makes children vulnerable to adverse reactions and that persists after them. By assessing and addressing brainstem and upper cervical spine function through INSiGHT Scans and specific adjustments, this approach aims to restore nervous system regulation, supporting the immune, gut, and detoxification systems that conventional pediatrics often leaves unaddressed. Find a PX Docs office at pxdocs.com/directory.

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