Did Joe Rogan podcast guest Dr. Suzanne Humphries accurately describe problems with the polio vaccine and with organized medicine's responses to polio? No, that's not true: A Brown University Medical School professor said Humphries made several errors of fact. She erred in claiming DDT pesticide caused polio and that symptoms of arsenic poisoning match those of polio, leading to misdiagnosis. And he said she incorrectly asserted that tonsillectomies caused many of the worst cases of polio.
Dr. Humphries' claims were summarized in a YouTube excerpt of Episode #2294 (archived here) posted March 26, 2025. The author and vaccine skeptic opened her critique of vaccines at the 5:55 mark:
Vaccine trials have always been a bit of a joke but they're even more of a joke today than they were in the beginning.
Here's what the YouTube video of the podcast looked like at the time this was written:
(Source: YouTube.com screenshot taken by Lead Stories)
Dr. Humphries' self-published book, "Dissolving Illusions" argues that sanitation and other modernization effects stamped out infectious diseases like polio, and not vaccinations. Licensed in Maine, she practiced nephrology and now describes herself as a holistic health consultant and author. The book lists the Amazon self-publishing tool "Create Space" as publisher.
This fact check does not address every claim made by Humphries, only those that are most clearly false.
Humphries' Claim: Vaccine testing doesn't include saline placebo control groups
At 6:11 in the excerpt clip, Humphries says:
if you're testing a measles vaccine you know you could test it against a diphtheria vaccine or a flu shot vaccine is tested against a hepatitis A vaccine. There's no saline placebo because the few studies that exist with saline placebos show how bad the vaccine actually is and how it makes you not only not respond to the disease when it comes around but more susceptible to it.
"This is such nonsense that, as a physician scientist, I find it insulting," said Pediatrics Professor Philip Gruppuso, MD, of the Brown University Alpert Medical School.
Gruppuso, whose most recent medical journal article concerns infant mortality, said it's easy to find evidence that vaccine trials do include saline placebo control group testing. "A nice historical review of the original polio vaccine trial can be found here. The original trial did, of course, incorporate a placebo-controlled randomized design -- along with a huge observational study. The vaccine was 80-90% effective in preventing paralytic polio." Gruppuso's citation was to a British Medical Journal historical review of the Salk vaccine's development.
Humphries' Claim: DDT pesticide use caused the polio outbreak of the early and mid-1900s
At 12:37, Humphries repeated a claim also made by others, and debunked: that widespread use of the pesticide DDT caused polio:
...the tonnage of production of DDT absolutely mirrored the the diagnosis for polio in those days and the countries that still make DDT today is where we're still seeing this paralytic polio situation happen.
In a 2023 fact check, Lead Stories found, most significantly, that polio has existed since prehistoric times, while DDT was not synthesized until 1874 and its effectiveness as an insecticide was not known until 1939, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 because of its many known health risks, including vomiting, seizures and impacts on reproduction and the liver. But, polio is not one of the identified risks of exposure to DDT. Polio, declared eradicated in the United States in 1979, is caused by a virus. The vaccine -- not the end of DDT use -- is what's responsible for the massive drop in cases, according to advice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gruppuso said Humphries' claim about DDT describes a coincidence as a cause:
By this reasoning, I suspect that the rise in television viewing hours by children also mirrors (inversely) the diagnosis rates of many childhood illnesses. Someone should ask Dr. Humphries if exposure to screens prevents measles.
Humphries' Claim: Arsenic poisoning presents the same symptoms as polio
At 13:52, Humphries said arsenic was widely used on farms during the early days of the polio outbreak and the symptoms of arsenic poisoning looked just like polio, leading to inflated reports of polio case numbers:
I've got medical references ... I can't get away with making stuff up, okay? I have to put a reference for everything. But, arsenic causes the exact same spinal pathology and fevers and everything. It literally mimics what they were calling polio and a polio virus back in the day.
Gruppuso said this, too, is false:
Arsenic poisoning and polio have very little in common from a symptom standpoint. From everything I could find, arsenic does not cause paralysis. I don't know how else to respond to this except to say it's nonsense. And, if arsenic exposure were to be a cause of clinical polio-like illness, we'd still be seeing a lot of it in parts of our country where arsenic levels are high in drinking water.
Humphries' Claim: Tonsillectomies open up patients to some of the worst cases of polio
At 20:31 of the excerpt video, Humphries said some of the most serious cases of polio during the polio outbreak of the 1900s were caused by tonsillectomies:
... if you happen to have poliomyelitis circulating in your body ... and then you go and take tonsils out then what you've done is you've given that access to the blood compartment ... the lymph compartment and the brain stem which is right there local. So, those were the people that would get what was called bulbar polio which is the ones that put you on a ventilator. It's highly lethal. It's one of it's the worst kind of polio to get, bulbar polio, and it was very well known to have been coincident with tonsillectomy.
Again, no basis in fact. Just plain stupid. Polio is still endemic in many countries where vaccination has not been available. These are not countries where children are undergoing tonsillectomy. When tonsillectomies cause paralysis, it is paralysis of muscles in the head and neck because of nerve damage.
