Interview with Roman Bystrianyk
The Charts That Changed Everything
Roman Bystrianyk is one of the most patient historians of health you will ever read. His work is built from official mortality records, century-old medical journals, government archives, and the writings of establishment doctors themselves. He plots the data, sources it, and lets it speak. What emerges is a picture of the last two centuries that almost no one has been shown: the collapse of mortality from what were called the great infectious diseases, achieved decades before the arrival of the interventions credited with the victory.
Measles down 98% before 1963. Whooping cough down 99% before 1957. Scarlet fever, typhoid, and diphtheria falling in near-perfect parallel, without any vaccine at all. Roman’s own journey began the day he came across a chart making one of those claims, dismissed it as absurd, and then went to the library determined to prove it wrong. He could not. The raw mortality data from the U.S. Vital Statistics was sound. That afternoon he sat motionless for a long time with one of his most deeply held beliefs lying in ruins, and the investigation that followed has continued ever since.
The book Roman co-authored with Dr Suzanne Humphries, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, is one of the most important books I have ever read. I am eternally grateful for the years of archival work, the trips to distant libraries, the photocopied fragments of forgotten journals, and the sheer intellectual honesty it took to produce it. If there is a single myth that keeps modern medicine’s authority intact — the myth that vaccines rid us of disease — Dissolving Illusions is the axe that brings it down. The book does not shout. It shows. And once you have seen those charts, once you have followed the sources back to the primary records, you cannot unsee them.
What follows is a written interview with Roman covering the ground his readers care about most: the mortality data that started his journey, the sanitary revolution that actually saved the West, the 1918 experiments where researchers could not make anyone sick no matter how hard they tried, the environmental story behind what was called polio, the vitamin C work of Dr Fred Klenner, the eugenics precedent that still sits on the books, and what a modern reader can practically do with all of it. Roman is generous with his time and careful with his claims. I hope you find this conversation as clarifying as I did.
With thanks and gratitude to Roman Bystrianyk.
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Audio Overview
1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what first set you on this path of investigating the hidden history of health and medicine? Was there a specific moment or discovery that made you realize the standard story we’ve all been told might not add up?
My background is in engineering and computer programming, but by my late 20s, I started having health issues that turned my attention to working on those. I started listening to health-related radio programs that occasionally discussed vaccines, autism, and neurologic damage. I’d always accepted the standard story: vaccines were a lifesaving triumph, and while rare injuries were tragic, they were the price of progress against deadly plagues. I couldn’t even say where I’d learned this—it was just a core belief.
The turning point came when I came across Neil Miller’s book on vaccination. I saw a chart claiming measles deaths had dropped 95% before the measles vaccine was introduced. I thought it was absurd and dismissed it outright. But the claim gnawed at me, so I went to the library to prove it wrong. After digging through almanacs, I found the raw mortality data, plotted it myself, and, with shock, realized the chart was accurate—the decline had indeed happened long before the vaccine arrived.
That moment dismantled one of my deepest assumptions and sparked an obsession. I spent years visiting libraries across the country, digging through century-old medical journals and books, photocopying and piecing together forgotten fragments. What started as a fact-checking mission became a full-scale investigation into the hidden history of health and medicine—one that continues to this day.
2. You’ve written that nearly 30 years ago, seeing a chart showing measles deaths had dropped by 98% before any vaccine existed completely dumbfounded you. What was that moment like for you, and what happens for other people when they see those charts for the first time?
I’ll never forget that moment. Sitting in the library with my hand-drawn graph paper, staring at the curve I had just plotted, I felt the floor drop out from under me. There it was—the same stark decline I’d dismissed in Miller’s book: measles deaths had plummeted roughly 95% before the vaccine ever arrived in the 1960s. I sat motionless for a long time, one of my most deeply held beliefs lying in ruins.
It was a bitter pill. I had to confront not just that I was wrong, but that I had been walking around with a fundamental misunderstanding of something I’d never questioned. I felt stupid. I felt deceived. And worse—I began to wonder why I’d never been told this. Why didn’t I know? Something felt deeply off.
My first instinct, I confess, was to doubt the source. Maybe the almanac was flawed. I wanted it to be flawed—desperately—so I could climb back into the comfort of my old belief. But I couldn’t let it go. So, I tracked down the raw data from the U.S. Vital Statistics and ran the numbers myself. That’s when I saw the full picture: a 98% decline in measles mortality before 1963. I checked, double-checked, triple-checked. I looked for every possible error I could have made. In the end, there was no escaping it. The data was sound. I had to accept it—and that acceptance launched the years of research that eventually became Dissolving Illusions.
So, when I see others react with shock or disbelief to those same charts, I truly understand. I was that guy! I know exactly what it feels like to have your world tilted and to desperately search for a way to right it, to prove it all wrong. That visceral resistance isn’t a sign of ignorance—it’s a sign that the foundation of your understanding is cracking. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. And for most people—including me—it takes time to process. But I also know that confronting that discomfort is where real inquiry begins.
3. The mortality declines you’ve documented — 90 to 99% drops in deaths from measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and even smallpox, all before vaccines arrived — track almost perfectly with the sanitary revolution of the late 1800s. What were the changes on the ground that made the biggest difference?
The mortality declines you’re referring to—those 90–99% drops in deaths from measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and even smallpox, all before vaccines arrived—are indeed one of the most overlooked chapters in medical history. And when you look at what actually drove those declines, the evidence points overwhelmingly to what can only be called a sanitation and social revolution, which I often refer to as the world’s greatest health revolution.
The single biggest factor was clean water and proper sewage disposal. In the late 1800s, cities began investing in municipal water filtration and chlorination, and in building sewer systems that separated human waste from drinking water. This alone slashed death rates from waterborne and fecal-oral diseases like typhoid and diphtheria. But the changes went far beyond that.
Better nutrition played a massive role. As incomes rose and food distribution and storage (icebox to start and then refrigeration), people ate more varied and nutritious diets. Stronger immune systems meant that even when people became ill, they were far less likely to die. This is a point often missed: the same pathogen that killed a malnourished child in a crowded tenement might only cause a mild illness in a well-fed child with room to breathe.
Housing and living conditions also transformed. The infamous basement slums and overcrowded tenements of the industrial revolution were gradually replaced by better housing with proper ventilation, light, and space. Labor laws shortened work hours and increasingly restricted child labor, giving people more time and energy to care for themselves and their families. Even something as simple as electrification made a difference—it reduced indoor air pollution from oil lamps and allowed for safer food storage through refrigeration.
The decline of harmful medical practices cannot be overstated. In the 19th century, standard treatments often included bloodletting, mercury, and arsenic—things that weakened patients rather than helped them. As these practices fell out of favor and doctors adopted more hygienic methods, iatrogenic (doctor-caused) harm decreased significantly.
Perhaps most tellingly, the decline in mortality followed the same trajectory for diseases that had no vaccine at all—like scarlet fever and typhoid—as it did for those that later got vaccines. This tells us that the driving force was not a specific medical intervention but a broad, fundamental shift in how people lived.
The data from England and Wales, which goes back to 1838, is especially striking. Measles deaths had declined by over 99.9% before the vaccine was introduced in 1968. Whooping cough deaths dropped by over 99% before the vaccine arrived in 1957. These weren’t small improvements—they were near-total collapses in mortality, achieved by sanitation, nutrition, and rising living standards.
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So, when people see those charts for the first time and are shocked, I understand completely—I was that person. But the shock gives way to a deeper realization: the greatest health revolution wasn’t delivered by a needle. It was built by clean water, better food, decent housing, and the slow, hard-won progress of human dignity. That’s a story worth telling—and worth remembering.
4. The phrase “safe and effective” has become almost a reflex whenever vaccines are discussed. You’ve traced it back over 200 years to Edward Jenner’s original petition to Parliament, where he promised his cowpox procedure would work with “perfect ease and safety” and would “annihilate” smallpox forever. What happened in the years immediately after that promise — and what should that early history tell a modern reader hearing the same phrase today?
We have to realize Edward Jenner, the man credited with vaccination, was a product of his time. He based his concept on inoculation, which involved taking material from someone with smallpox and smearing it into a scratch or cut made with an instrument called a lancet, essentially a sharp knife. You were supposed to get sick with smallpox in a controlled setting, and then you could hope to be immune for life. Unfortunately, it was found to have a 2-3% fatality rate.
While it was certainly a dangerous procedure and proven to be futile with cases of smallpox increasing over the century, over the decades, it became deeply embedded in medical ideology.
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That idea persisted for 80 years. Jenner’s idea only shifted to a source of “cowpox,” which he believed was a mild disease that would protect you from smallpox. He claimed (whether he believed it or was just exaggerating) that it protected you for life, which had no basis in reality. That claim was quickly found, over a few years, to be false, but the idea of vaccination became embedded (like inoculation) in the medical and public imagination. Keep in mind that what a “vaccine” was shifted from decade to decade and practitioner to practitioner. Suffice it to say it wasn’t a uniform product in any shape or form.
In 1888, Dr. T. V. Gifford noted this:
“It is a convenient habit of vaccinators to speak of vaccinations as uniform, as if the virus of the rite were as definite as a drop of water, a pinch of salt, or a grain of gold. Nothing could be further from the truth. The virus called vaccine is not one but various, not uniform but multiform, not certain but uncertain with an uncertainty which in transit from body to body, ad infinitum, can be predicted nor ascertained… The matter of his lancet he cannot define and its effects he cannot foresee... To these Jennerian stocks have been added Smallpox Cowpox obtained by inoculating cows with the virus or pus of human smallpox. Thus we have virus derived from horse grease cowpox, from natural or spontaneous cowpox, from horsepox, and from smallpox cowpox, plus the constitutional taints of the generations of vaccinifers through which these diverse poxes have been passed; and which is which, and how modified for better or for worse in the course of travel none can tell.”
Only a few years after vaccination became popular, Dr. William Rowley documented 75 deaths out of 504 vaccinated individuals, contradicting the claim of “perfect ease and safety.” By 1810, Charles Maclean, MD, presented tables showing 535 cases of smallpox occurring after cowpox inoculation, along with 150 fatalities. As the promise of lifetime immunity crumbled, the medical orthodoxy responded not by abandoning the practice, but by modifying it. The birth of “revaccination” was a clear admission of the original promise’s failure, yet the core belief in the procedure remained unshaken. In England, it became a legal requirement for children to be vaccinated before they reached three months of age, despite the growing evidence of failure and harm.
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The tagline for every vaccine has been the same—“safe and effective.” I just saw this very same phrase used by a politician when asking someone whether they believed mRNA was “safe and effective.” Of course, the person responded that yes, they believed it was “safe and effective.” It’s been a deeply embedded way to sell a product to the public. Everyone is programmed with that vaccine tagline, and it’s something most politicians and public health officials automatically utter because it creates easy acceptance without any thought. They ring the bell, and the dogs drool.
5. The 1918 experiments you’ve written about — where researchers took 261 healthy volunteers, had gravely ill patients cough directly into their faces, injected them with material from the dying, and could not produce a single case of illness — are extraordinary. What stands out most to you about those experiments, and what do you wish more people knew about them?
What happened in 1918, when scientists tried to prove that the flu spread from person to person, is a story of ideology colliding with stubborn facts—and ideology winning. Dr. Milton Rosenau and his team were absolutely certain they knew how influenza spread. They set out to prove it with experiments that, by modern standards, were brutal in their directness. They took lung tissue from recent victims who had died in agony and sprayed it directly into the noses, eyes, and throats of healthy volunteers. They collected secretions from the sick and sprayed those into volunteers. They drew blood from the ill and injected it into the healthy. When none of that worked, they escalated.
In the most astonishing experiment, volunteers were led to the bedside of ten different flu patients, each within three days of symptom onset. They shook hands. They chatted. Then, “muzzle to muzzle, about 2 inches between the two,” the patient exhaled while the volunteer inhaled. They did this five times. Then the patient coughed directly into the volunteer’s face—five times. And then the volunteer moved to the next patient and repeated the entire procedure. By the end, each volunteer had been intimately exposed to ten different flu patients in every conceivable way.
And yet—not one became ill.
Rosenau and his team were “rather surprised and somewhat perplexed.” In 1919, he published his results with a confession that must have cost him considerable professional pride: “…we entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.” In total, 261 volunteers had been injected, sprayed, swabbed, breathed upon, and coughed upon—and none became sick. The results shocked the investigators. And then the entire affair was quietly forgotten.
Why? Because the results were inconvenient. The prevailing wisdom—the belief in a contagious virus—was too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by a few failed experiments. It was easier to ignore the data than to question the paradigm. And so, the presumption remained: the flu was transmitted from person to person, through coughs and sneezes. It was never seriously examined again—until 2008, when a review found that “no human experimental studies published in the English-language literature delineating person-to-person transmission of influenza“ existed. Ninety years, and not a single study proving transmission. Then came 2024, when the EMIT-2 trial—a modern study designed to be definitive—used naturally infected donors and prolonged close contact in poorly ventilated settings. The result? Zero transmissions. Out of eleven recipients, not one became ill.
The pattern is unmistakable. In 1918, Rosenau failed. In 2008, the review found no evidence. In 2024, the most sophisticated trial ever conducted failed again. Yet the ideology persists. This is what happens when your ideology is so deeply embedded that it can’t be believed—when the evidence contradicts what you know to be true, you set the evidence aside.
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So, what should a modern reader take from this? That the belief in respiratory transmission—the foundation of masks, lockdowns, and social distancing—has never actually been proven. That the experiments designed to prove it have repeatedly failed, over more than a century. And that when science confronts evidence that contradicts its most cherished assumptions, it too often looks away.
Does that mean that a contagion is not part of the equation? I would say not definitely. But there is much more to the picture than the simple equation of microbe equals disease that has largely been ignored. And it may be likely that transmitting a flu or similar virus from the sick to the healthy (which involves a complex set of criteria) appears to be virtually impossible.
6. Your work on polio makes a compelling case that lead arsenate pesticides sprayed on apple orchards aligned almost perfectly with the seasonal pattern of paralysis outbreaks. What drew you to that connection, and what should a parent today take from it about how we think about causation?
Short answer: reading—lots and lots of reading. When you do that, you happen upon information you weren’t expecting, and then you need to take that and put it into a category of how that puzzle piece might fit into a bigger picture.
In 1911, Dr. Batten found a seasonal relationship for polio, with the greatest prevalence in July, August, September, and October. A chart in 1941 in The Journal of Pediatrics showed the same for the epidemics of 1916 and 1931 in New York. That alone shows something that is never discussed and made me question why a virus would be a problem only in the summer months.
In addition, hospital observations and family case studies from the early 1900s challenge the idea that polio is highly contagious. In hospitals, infected children were placed in wards without isolation, yet no secondary cases occurred among the 70 children exposed. Similarly, within households, close family members—including siblings who shared beds—remained unaffected, even when living with an infected person. Additionally, cases appeared in individuals with no known exposure to others with the disease, suggesting that direct person-to-person transmission was not a key factor in polio’s spread.
And a Report of the Secretary’s Commission on Pesticides and Their Relationship to Environmental Health in 1969 found that “The third phase of chronic arsenical intoxication is marked by peripheral neuritis, which is often mild, at first, but which may progress to motor paralysis in more severe cases.”
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These pieces of the puzzle, scattered across decades of forgotten medical literature, led me to think there was a great deal more to the story—and that the story we have been told may not be the one that truly happened.
7. You’ve documented that after 60 years of annual flu shots, mortality rates today are roughly where they were before mass vaccination began — and that Anthony Fauci himself, in a 2023 paper, conceded the effectiveness of these products would be “inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases.” For a reader who’s been getting the flu shot every year, what practical shift would you invite them to consider?
Data. We are supposed to be a society that makes decisions based on it—yet, more often than not, we seem to ignore it entirely. So, what do we actually see when we look at the numbers?
In 1900, influenza and pneumonia were among the leading causes of death in the United States, with a combined crude death rate of 202.2 deaths per 100,000 population. Over the next seven decades, this rate fell sharply, reaching 25.8 per 100,000 by 1975—an 87% decline in mortality, a remarkable public health achievement by any measure. Yet, the fact that this happened is mostly unknown. The why is virtually never asked.
It is true that after vaccination coverage increased among adults aged 65 and older in the 1990s, deaths from flu and pneumonia continued to fall. But that is only part of the story. The endpoints are almost identical: 25.8 in 1975 and 25.9 in 2018. The linear slope is virtually flat. Mortality climbed for roughly three decades, peaked around 2000, and then declined—leaving a near-zero long-term trajectory. Fauci and company admit, “after more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted.” Data and honest admission of more than half a century of failure disappear into the ether.
So, what does the data actually say? Decades of flu vaccination have not prevented any deaths that were not already in decline (nearly 90%) long before the vaccines arrived. The great victory over influenza and pneumonia was won not by the needle, but by sanitation, nutrition, and rising living standards—the same forces that tamed nearly every other infectious disease of the era. The vaccine era, by contrast, has produced no measurable improvement in the mortality rate that had already been achieved. That is not a judgment—it is simply what the data shows, if we are willing to look.
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8. One of the most disturbing threads in your work is the historical link between compulsory vaccination and eugenics. In the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes literally cited vaccination law as the legal precedent for forced sterilization, writing that “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized under laws built on that logic. How much of that same logic do you see operating in the mandate arguments we heard during COVID?
The primary issue is government interference, which began with draconian compulsory vaccination laws in England in 1853. The idea was that people had to be forced to vaccinate, and if they refused, they faced fines or jail. Governments were manipulated by a belief in a faction of medical men who pushed their notion and became quite wealthy in doing so. Eventually, in 1885, because the vaccine failed to protect and injured or killed so many, the small town of Leicester rebelled, and by 1886, a new government was put into place that stopped the prosecution of people who refused to vaccinate themselves or their children.
This massive government overreach that harmed so many occurred in the so-called lands of the “free” slowly faded away, but did not entirely disappear. In 1948, compulsory vaccination ended in England. By that point, the experiment of significantly reducing vaccination in Leicester and the “Leicester method,” which had been going on for more than 60 years, proved a great success. In 1948, Dr. Millard stated:
“...in Leicester during the 62 years since infant vaccination was abandoned there have been only 53 deaths from smallpox, and in the past 40 years only two deaths. Moreover, the experience in Leicester is confirmed, and strongly confirmed, by that of the whole country. Vaccination has been steadily declining ever since the “conscience clause” was introduced, until now nearly two-thirds of the children born are not vaccinated. Yet smallpox mortality has also declined until now quite negligible. In the fourteen years 1933-1946 there were only 28 deaths in a population of some 40 million, and among those 28 there was not a single death of an infant under 1 year of age.”
Was the idea of compulsory vaccination ever reviewed to see if it was an overall benefit to mankind? No. Absolutely not. Instead, the idea was planted into the minds of government officials that they could impose their will on their populations anytime they saw fit for the so-called “public good.” Freedom does not really exist in our modern democracies, as we saw in recent years. Lord Acton’s saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” captures the pervasive attitude in our political class. They feel they can sterilize the “unfit” as they had in the past, can remove children from their parents if they don’t vaccinate, can allow state officials—as in Connecticut—to abolish any religious or philosophical exemption to a vaccine, and, as during COVID, destroy lives with their totalitarian tactics. They have also deeply embedded this anti-freedom notion that you have “opt out” of vaccines. If you believe in freedom (which most politicians do not—not in any real sense), only “opt in” would exist.
The same logic that sustained compulsory vaccination in the 19th century—the notion that the state’s interest in a “pure” or “healthy” population overrides individual liberty—was explicitly invoked to justify forced sterilization in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” That was not a rhetorical flourish; it was the legal foundation upon which tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized against their will.
And when we heard mandate arguments during COVID—when we heard that individual choice must yield to the collective good, that medical procedures could be compelled, that those who refused were a threat to society—we were hearing the same logic, dressed in different clothes. It was not called eugenics, but the underlying premise was identical: that the state has the right, indeed the duty, to override bodily autonomy in the name of public health. You have no rights in their minds. The names change, the rhetoric shifts, but the principle remains dangerously the same.
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9. Tell us about Dr. Fred Klenner. His clinical work in the 1940s — treating what were called polio, measles, and shingles cases with high-dose vitamin C, with recoveries in 72 hours — is the kind of thing every parent should know exists. Why does his work matter, and what should a curious reader do with it?
I posit that if Dr. Fred Klenner had discovered a universal medication or vaccine to cure what he had discovered, he would be hailed as one of the great men of medical science. Dr. Klenner’s failure is that he used something natural. And to the horror of medicine, a lowly vitamin. He noted in an article he wrote, “There are some physicians who would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid—because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin.” Sadly, today we can assume that “some” would be “virtually all.”
Using vitamin C, he discovered that it could treat a wide range of infectious diseases when administered at high, frequent doses. During the 1948 North Carolina polio epidemic, he treated 60 patients with high-dose vitamin C injections every two to four hours; all recovered fully within 72 hours. In measles outbreaks, he found that prophylactic doses offered complete protection, while therapeutic doses resolved symptoms in 48 hours. He treated eight cases of herpes zoster with intravenous and oral vitamin C; seven experienced complete pain relief within two hours, with lesions clearing within three days. He cured diphtheria in half the time required by antitoxin therapy, with the membrane dissolving rather than sloughing off and without the risk of serum reactions. He also treated chickenpox, mumps, influenza, and viral encephalitis with similarly dramatic results—six cases of encephalitis were cured. In a later paper, he reported that vitamin C and calcium gluconate effectively neutralize the venom of the black widow spider. Despite these extraordinary achievements—demonstrating that a single, safe, inexpensive nutrient could outperform the standard treatments of his era—his work was ignored, his findings never replicated by the mainstream, and his legacy buried under the weight of an industry that had no use for a cure it could not patent.
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10. You’ve written that modern Americans are “overfed but undernourished” — 82% of adults overweight, magnesium in food down as much as 80% since 1950, restaurant portions four times what they were in the 1950s. For someone who wants to break free of what you call “Sickness Inc.,” where would you tell them to begin?
As a modern society, we have been drawn in by the “easy button” of golden arches, easy-open bags of chips in a startling array of flavors, cardboard boxes of cereals with happy cartoon characters pushing their colored, toxic contents, and a quick call to order a cheap pizza. In addition, we are being “easy button” entertained to death—television, 24/7 Internet access, Facebook, Netflix, TikTok, doom scrolling, and other endless distractions which have replaced silent contemplation, being out in nature, and exercise. The result is an escalating obesity rate and a sickly society, which is easily observable in the denizens of Walmart or your local mall.
Then those lifestyle wounded seek “easy button” answers from somewhere—be it scam devices, trendy vitamins, or programs. And we have been confused by the notion of so-called “health care” with what it actually is—medical care. We are trained to believe that health is a product to be purchased rather than a way of life to be cultivated. Visit your doctor, run a battery of tests, receive a diagnosis, and swallow a pill—and if that pill fails, a newer, shinier one will surely arrive. Ozempic, gastric bypass, statins, the latest blockbuster pharmaceutical—each promises to erase the consequences of our lifestyle without asking us to change it. Never mind the serious side effects, the fine print, the liver warnings, the nausea, or the muscle wasting. The advertisements, featuring radiant, thin, impossibly happy actors, assure us that salvation is just a prescription away. The same seduction applies to gadgets, supplements, and miracle cures peddled on social media—each promising to deliver the body of your dreams with no sweat, no sacrifice, and no discipline. It is a fantasy, but it is an easy button to press.
All these easy solutions promise to fix what ails us, but they do not address the underlying issues that largely created the problems in the first place. Add in slick advertisers and huge financial backing, and we get what I termed “The Sickness Industrial Complex”—a vast, interlocking system of cheap, hyper-palatable food, passive digital entertainment, and reactive medical interventions, all lubricated by slick advertising and backed by staggering financial investments. This is the ecosystem we inhabit: a society meticulously evolved to satiate our craving for the easy button, while systematically undermining our health, our attention, and our humanity. It is not a conspiracy; it is a marketplace responding to our weakest impulses.
So where would I tell someone to begin? The answer is disarmingly simple, though culturally radical: move your body, eat real food, and soak up the sun. Start with daily walking—at least 30 minutes of brisk movement. Commit to eating food that grew, swam, or grazed—not food-like substances in boxes with lengthy ingredient lists filled with unpronounceable chemicals. Get outside for 15 to 30 minutes of direct sunlight on unprotected skin during peak hours. Sleep in total darkness. Cook at home more often. Read labels relentlessly. Prioritize whole, unprocessed foods. These are not newfangled wellness fads; they are the ancient, enduring blueprint of human thriving, validated by both cutting-edge science and the timeless wisdom of our ancestors.
The easy button is always within reach—but so is the door to the sunlight. Step through it. Your body, your mind, and your future self will thank you.
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11. Your book Dissolving Illusions was co-authored with Dr. Suzanne Humphries and has become something of a touchstone for people questioning the vaccine narrative. How did that collaboration come about, what did each of you bring to it, and what has it been like working together across the different editions?
As I read, dug, researched, and pondered, I decided I had to share the information with the world. I still couldn’t believe no one had before, so it was a leap. The first outline and start of the book I had, I eventually discarded, thinking, “Why am I wasting my time with this. Why bother?” That book was deleted from my computer with the intent of never going back.
Yet, it pulled me back, and I restarted the project. I started writing chapters. More as documents of understanding—of consolidating—all the information into some type of cohesive structure. Eventually, I had a binder of proto-chapters and a sense that I could actually make this into a book.
But I did realize I needed a co-author who was a doctor. Who would listen to someone without that background? I assumed virtually no one. So, I kept working and hoped that someone would happen along. And then one day, I was listening to a Gary Null program on the radio, and a woman was talking about smallpox, and it was at that moment that I knew I had found a doctor to work on this. Strangely, to me, it wasn’t a “I hope” but a “I knew.”
I ended up calling her—Dr. Suzanne Humphries—and after three messages left on her answering machine (third time is the charm!), she returned my call. I explained what I was doing, and she invited me up to Maine to talk about it. I went up, she read what I had thus far, and she signed onto the endeavor.
We spent the next 4 years going back and forth on the entire book. Suzanne brought a depth of medical understanding that I couldn’t have hoped to achieve, particularly in the chapters on polio, whooping cough, and measles. I drudged through the charts, history digging, editing, and other chapters. We had a lot of overlap, really – it was a dynamic shared collaboration. Neither could have done it alone. Finally, in 2013, we declared the book “done” (even though we decided not to finish several chapters, because otherwise we would have worked on it for another 4 years and created a 1,000-page book!). That year, Dissolving Illusions was revealed to the world.
12. So much of the evidence you assemble comes straight from government records, mainstream medical journals, and the writings of establishment doctors themselves. For a reader who wants to verify what you present and start building their own understanding, where would you point them?
Follow your nose—but not like that old cartoon commercial with the toucan, trying to lure you into buying sugary, colored cereal. Instead, start reading. Dig. Read more. Dig again. Over and over, with an open mind. There is simply an infinite supply of old books, documents, journals, and newspapers waiting to be explored. Follow the trails wherever they lead. There is so much out there that you could never possibly read it all—but as you go deeper, you will find so much you just never knew.
While working on my environmental book, I came across a volume titled Extermination of the American Bison, written by William Hornaday in 1889. It was an amazing, horrifying journey into how humanity nearly wiped out an entire species.
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At some point, I also found the Final Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Subject of Vaccination, published in 1896. It was a long, mostly dry read—it took weeks—but the interesting information I uncovered made it all worth it.
More to read here:
So do not get your information from memes, TikTok, or YouTube videos presented by people with an agenda. Some of that content is good, but nothing—nothing—beats reading what people had to say back in time. The original sources are where the real stories live, buried in plain sight, waiting for someone curious enough to dig them up.
And for goodness’ sake, do not use ChatGPT or other AI (really large language models) as the source of truth. AI hallucinations are real. Do not get sucked into the illusions. Use it as a tool if you must, but never as a definitive source of truth. These systems can summarize, organize, and point you in useful directions—but they cannot replace the hard, patient work of sitting with original documents, weighing conflicting accounts, and thinking for yourself. The real discoveries are not generated by algorithms; they are unearthed by curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to question everything you have been told.
13. You often return to John F. Kennedy’s line that “the great enemy of the truth is not the lie but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.” After nearly three decades of this work, what’s the myth you find hardest to dislodge, even in people who are otherwise open?
The myth I find hardest to dislodge—even in people who are otherwise open—is the conviction that vaccines and infectious diseases are exactly what we have been told, and that medical interventions are the wonders we celebrate them to be. Woven into that is the deeper myth about the true nature of health itself: that it is something to be purchased, injected, or prescribed, rather than cultivated through daily choices in food, movement, sunlight, and connection.
All three are interrelated and deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. And interestingly enough, each comes with its own militant factions—virus versus no-virus, vegan versus keto, and countless other battle lines drawn in the sand. I do not fight those battles. What I try to do is remain as objective as possible and focus on how we can all achieve the best possible health. That is not easy, because most people are deeply embedded in their own ideas. If they are open to new information and willing to question their assumptions, that is wonderful. If not, I am happy to let people believe whatever they want—without anger, without argument, without the need to convert anyone. The truth, as I have come to see it, does not require a crusade. It only requires the patience to keep digging, keep reading, and keep an open mind—and to let the evidence speak for itself, to whoever is willing to listen.
Do I know everything, even in what I have focused on? Heck no! The more you read, dig, and ponder, the more you realize just how much you do not know. How could I? How could anyone? There are countless things to read and think about that no human—over a thousand lifetimes—could ever accomplish. And that knowledge is only a tiny fraction of the vast universe out there. So, I would say: try to remain humble. Keep an open mind. Listen to others. And realize that everyone out there is simply doing the best they can with the knowledge they have obtained and the experiences they have lived through. None of us has the full picture; we are all piecing together fragments, stumbling toward understanding. That is not a weakness—it is the shared condition of being human. And it is precisely why curiosity, patience, and compassion matter more than certainty.
14. What are you currently working on, and where can readers follow your work, get your books, subscribe to your Substack, or otherwise stay in touch to keep learning from you?
I’m often found exploring various topics on Substack (as you might have noticed with all my Substack links).
We have three books: Dissolving Illusions First Edition, Dissolving Illusions 10th Anniversary Edition, and Dissolving Illusions Companion and Reference. They can also be purchased from our website, DissolvingIllusions.com, which offers them in a variety of languages, formats, and locations.
Kathryn Schmutter and I published Moving Back from Midnight: Working Together to Save Our Planet as a call to action—to highlight the damage and inspire a change in direction.
My latest creation, a work of historical fiction, is the one I had the most fun with—Tender Mercies. Here’s a glimpse:
Victoria glanced down at the fallen book, which now lay slightly open and oddly tilted with its spine pointing upward. She reached for it, flipping it right-side up, squinting at the cover. “Have you read this…?” she asked, still blinking away the fog of sleep. “Cobbett’s book on advice?”
“Yes, of course,” Annabelle replied with a slight curve of her lips. “I was quite the voracious reader in my youth.”
Victoria flipped to the page where her ribbon had marked her place. “The part about… um… those who were vaccinated by this Jenner and still died of smallpox?” She pursed her lips, her brow furrowing slightly. “Isn’t that strange to you?”
Annabelle’s mouth curved into a subtle, knowing grin. “Well, perhaps not so strange—not anymore. Even back then, after what I witnessed in my own family, it didn’t entirely surprise me.” She leaned forward slightly, her voice low and deliberate. “There are many things you’ll find that men—particularly men in positions of power—insist are true. But often,” she added with a glint in her eye, “they are not.”
To learn about Victoria’s journey, visit: tendermerciesbook.com or on Amazon.
To read more about my writing journey, visit: The Journey of Tender Mercies
Roman Bystrianyk! It was thanks to him that I realized that all these deaths from all these diseases disappeared before vaccines were introduced. That’s data not even the most vaccine believer can ignore: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/how-i-broke-chatgpt-by-asking-about
Thank you Roman for your work!
From my perspective, lies over time have become the truth for one purpose.
To murder as many people possible while making a ton of money doing so !!!