Ken Rutgers is a former NFL Quarterback, Hall of Fame inductee and current Medical Fairness Advocate. He played 12 seasons with the Green Bay Packers and won a Super Bowl with them in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ken is also the author of "How Dads can be role models for their kids" and has written a book, "How to be a Dads Role Model: A Guide to Dads in the NFL and Beyond." Ken and his wife, Roberta, are a loving, hard-working, and dedicated family and friends. Roberta is a mom of three and a wife, and has been through a lot in her life. In this episode, Ken talks about his wife's journey with the MMR vaccine and how he and his family have been through the process of advocating for her. He also shares his thoughts on the controversy surrounding the use of the controversial M.O.D.V. vaccine and the controversy that surrounds its use in the public eye. Ken also shares some of his own personal experiences with MMR and the challenges he has faced in advocating for his wife and family, and how they have dealt with the challenges that have been presented to them by the medical community. Ken also talks about how he has been able to speak out on behalf of his wife in the fight for her case and how important it is to advocate for our kids and others in this space. Ken is a great role model for his family and a role model in the field of parenting and in the world of fatherhood. He is truly a hero and a hero in the way he lives out loud and clear in his passion for his love and respect for his kids and his dedication to his wife. . Thank you for listening and supporting this podcast, Ken! - Thank you so much for your support and for supporting the podcast! - Donations can be made here: bit.ly/support-the-fight-for-a-dads-and-family-and/or-health-care-careers-and we appreciate your support. Thank you, Ken Rutgers and his courageously fighting for our daughters and family-and his efforts to make a difference in this world. - thank you for being a voice for our boys and our kids' lives. and supporting our kids. Thanks to Dr. John Stockton Stockton-lawton-and our families-and all of our kids- and we appreciate it.
00:00:26.000Well, I don't even see it as courageous.
00:00:28.000I just see it as speaking out on behalf of, really advocating for my wife.
00:00:33.000So my wife took the first Moderna shot in January.
00:00:36.000She was, she's working on her master's in counseling.
00:00:39.000So she was, you know, at the top of the list for the rollout and immediately started within 48 hours, swollen lymph nodes, and eventually progressed to a numbness and tingling on her face, her scalp, down the Her arms into her hands, on her legs.
00:00:55.000And in fact, she just had a doctor's appointment yesterday with her neurologist.
00:01:00.000And it is since her first appointment back in late January, early February.
00:01:04.000Over the last six months, it's gotten progressively worse, her tingling and numbness.
00:01:09.000So she joined a group early on and is unable to find answers.
00:01:15.000So we've both done a lot of research, and that's the beginning of our journey.
00:01:23.000So it's interesting you ask that because I've done a lot of interviews and talked to a lot of people in the different groups that have found each other, many of them on Facebook.
00:01:33.000Some of them have recently been, private groups have been canceled by Facebook.
00:01:37.000But it's interesting that you ask because, and I'm sure you probably hear this with your long word, because people know these, the people that are, they know the exact date, which is so interesting to me.
00:02:44.000But in early January, you know, what was being said, what was being promoted, safe and effective, lots of social pressure, lots of the social construction of reality for what it meant and what the vaccine was.
00:02:58.000And I think the other thing that bothered me at the time that we talked about was...
00:03:08.000They had to redefine the definition for vaccine to slide it in there.
00:03:11.000And there's just too many red flags on this thing.
00:03:14.000Have you been a guy who has always taken care of your health and, you know, interested in kind of functional...
00:03:23.000Medicine or nutrition and those kind of things, I think you would have maybe a skepticism about new vaccine technology.
00:03:32.000Well, yeah, I mean, you know, as a pro athlete, I mean, nutrition, the body, trying to, you know, research, health, obviously traditional medicine, orthopedic mostly, playing football.
00:03:44.000But yeah, with this new technology, especially the speed at which it was rolled out, I was, it's concerning.
00:04:06.000I'd written a book to encourage dads to be role models for their own kids my last couple years in the NFL. And the publishing company was in And that's how you knew John Stockton was going to write you and I did that in the basketball grade.
00:04:30.000Yeah, so I just got to know John and talk with him just recently through this process.
00:04:37.000And it's interesting because what took me out of publishing and put me into a different space was advocating for sport career transition.
00:04:50.000So John Stockton's brother-in-law, I played next to him for a few years in Green Bay.
00:04:56.000He ended up in a SWAT standoff and was shot.
00:05:00.000He was unarmed, shot eight times and died.
00:05:02.000And a lot of us chalked it up as we talked, guys that played together, chalked it up to challenge identity, status, challenges with transition.
00:05:11.000And so I left publishing and did full-time work in that sport career transition space.
00:05:17.000And of course, now the NFL in 2015, they kind of took that on.
00:05:22.000And so that's when I got my doctorate in sociology, is to do a dissertation on sport career transition.
00:05:28.000But that was Stockton's brother-in-law.
00:05:31.000Then we connected recently through Senator Johnson, who has been an amazing advocate for my wife and people in her group and in her circumstances that are suffering from these severe reactions to the vaccine.
00:05:48.000You know, we're getting deluged by calls.
00:05:51.000In fact, I took two this morning from NFL players who don't want to take the vaccine or are trying to figure it out because the NFL is very, very tough on them.
00:05:59.000Yeah, so currently now it's due to change, right?
00:06:03.000Because training camp's coming up and the NFL realizes they're having, you know, a lot of high vaccine hesitancy.
00:06:10.000They're at about 30 or 40% vaccinated rate.
00:06:13.000And what they're saying, at least what they're saying kind of You know, under the, you know, kind of quietly, but they're saying to the players, is if you, when you come to training camp, if you haven't been vaccinated, then be prepared to travel on different flights, be in different hotels, eat at different, you know, in a different setting, and zoom in to meetings and film sessions.
00:06:35.000Well, I think back to, you know, I think back and go, well...
00:06:40.000So there's a lot of pressure that's being put on these young men to get vaccinated and not that much different than what we're seeing outside of sports either.
00:06:48.000Now, we have one who's a very well-known quarterback who is trying to figure out how to do it because they're also going to make them wear masks, like during practice and during games.
00:06:59.000And then we have another one who's a coach who does not want to get vaccinated, really, really is against it and really is trying to debate because he's being told.
00:07:31.000Now, when she found this group, and it was really, the irony is just dripping these days, right?
00:07:37.000So my wife, for lack of any medical diagnosis or certainty from many doctors and a couple of different neurologists that she saw within the first couple of weeks...
00:07:48.000And this is a very common story that I'm finding as I talk to people in her group, I should say groups, that she started doing her own research.
00:07:56.000And she found an article in Neurology Today that was online.
00:08:00.000And the irony is that Fauci was in the article saying, quoted as saying, this is a safe and effective shot.
00:08:09.000And she's sitting there going, what the heck?
00:08:33.000And they were trying to figure it out.
00:08:36.000They individually had contacted the FDA, the CDC, their politicians looking for help, looking for answers because the doctors in the medical community, this is new technology.
00:08:47.000So they weren't told how the medical community has not been told how to deal with it, what it is, how to, you know, it doesn't fit our medical model, at least currently, because the CDC and the people up above and the medical are not communicating any of this.
00:09:02.000And so eventually in May, they got together, again, mostly doctors, and they wrote a letter.
00:09:08.000And it was a well, well-written letter, kind of asking for help and to be heard and to be seen and to be helped.
00:09:14.000And they sent it to Janet Woodcock at the FDA and Rochelle Walensky at the CDC and sent it to the White House.
00:09:46.000My brother and I started a website for them, a space where they could share their stories.
00:09:51.000And there's well over 100 stories of people that have written in to share their stories on this site so they could feel like they're being heard, like they had a voice because their voice wasn't being heard.
00:10:01.000And then I started doing interviews so that they could have a video voice and somebody to ask them like a dialogue.
00:10:08.000I'm sure when you talk to people, there's a lot of there's a lot of healing power in that.
00:10:13.000And also getting the word out for those that are also traveling this desert in this space and was doing some editing and uploading this 12 year old who was in the youth trial in January, who was in a wheelchair, paralysis from the waist down, a feeding who was in a wheelchair, paralysis from the waist down, a feeding tube And you do that editing and you're going over the same stuff.
00:10:46.000I mean, you've been doing this for a long time, and so I thought, man, what a piece of low-hanging fruit for a politician to jump on this and be a hero, to advocate for these people, to do what representatives in Washington should do.
00:11:39.000And of course, I was so overwhelmed that he would even respond.
00:11:42.000I mean, I was teared up just because there was somebody that cared to hear the voices of my wife and the people in her group.
00:11:51.000So he said, well, how about, that was a Thursday.
00:11:54.000he said, how about on Sunday, we get on Zoom and, you know, have her group of people tell me their stories.
00:12:01.000And so on a Sunday evening for two hours, he listened, took notes to more than a half a dozen people tell their stories, just simply their stories.
00:12:11.000This is how I was before the shot, healthy, active.
00:12:14.000Then I took the shot on this date and this is what happened after the shot.
00:12:19.000And you start to see a pattern right now as a sociologist, I'm like going, yeah, hello, there's a pattern here.
00:12:48.000Now, it was after that press conference in Milwaukee on June 28th.
00:12:53.000Within a week, one of the private Facebook accounts that my wife was on, 300 people, got canceled.
00:13:00.000And we're talking, this is their lifeline.
00:13:04.000The doctors aren't willing to say, or most, not all, but most, they can't give a diagnosis because it doesn't fit in our current medical model, right?
00:13:23.000Another group, a week later, of 10,000 got canceled.
00:13:28.000Since I put up the website, which we put up a contact portal, and so I've been answering the emails that come in, and I see the same patterns.
00:14:17.000I mean, they're pretty like, well, I don't know.
00:14:20.000You know, they're a little standoffish, right?
00:14:22.000Now, you know, some of them are, they're concerned about my wife, right?
00:14:26.000But as I, you know, you start talking into that space, and it's like taboo.
00:14:31.000It's like, I'm like this deviant outlier, weird guy.
00:14:36.000But that's not our social construction of reality in this country right now.
00:14:40.000And our government officials, our media, I mean, all these people have also reached out to the media.
00:14:47.000And, you know, even I reached out to a local, to a regional radio guy.
00:14:51.000I thought, oh, this guy, talk about low-hanging fruit, put the whole, hey, you know, this is Ken Rutgers, Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame, Super Bowl champion, my wife, da-da-da.
00:15:01.000And Cheryl had, my wife Cheryl had, the day before, send an email, no response.
00:15:29.000So, fear of the cancel culture, which, you know, I mean, I talked to some of my colleagues, and they kind of laugh at this idea that there's this cancel culture even going on.
00:15:40.000It's just, we're in the twilight zone, as you probably know, Robert.
00:15:45.000Yeah, you know, how about the doctors?
00:15:47.000Because a lot of people are running into this really weird hostility from doctors.
00:15:53.000If you even say, I think there's a vaccine injury, you get the doctor who gets it.
00:16:23.000And it's almost as if people in that profession, so many of them have lost sight of that, and they believe that it's their job to silence dissent and to enforce state policies.
00:17:02.000She did one of those tilt tests for POTS. She did a skin biopsy.
00:17:07.000Very typical, what I'm hearing on the ground with dozens and dozens of people is these tests come back negative without any signs of what they're looking for.
00:17:23.000And so instead of saying, well, maybe it's the vaccine, or I would be saying, it's probably the vaccine, and we need to study what it is about this gene therapy that's causing these, that's releasing these protein spikes in the system, and these, I mean, I'm not a medical doctor.
00:17:40.000I'm a social scientist, but I'm not a medical doctor, so I'm This is what I'm hearing.
00:17:44.000And I have had also nurses and PAs that I've talked to.
00:17:49.000I talked to a PA who was a PA in a hospital.
00:17:53.000And what they're seeing, as an example, the rural county that this PA's hospital was in was about 40% vaccinated.
00:18:02.000And the patients in the hospital that were suffering from mostly heart and lung, but also some stroke-like symptoms, 80% of them, according to this PA, 80% of them had taken the vaccine, the shot.
00:18:17.000I mean, those kind of, all the VAERS, what we're seeing in VAERS, all these things should send up red flags to the people at the top in the medical community, and yet...
00:18:27.000And so they had a Facebook group of about 900 nurses and PAs between two hospitals that were communicating, trying to figure out how can we help these people?
00:19:31.000We know our space and we're very niched and mostly it's people that are still sick that are doing the work here, which is fine because we're trying to tell people in the many, many different groups.
00:19:43.000And of course, when a book group gets canceled, they find other areas, they join other groups, they migrate over to WeMe or some other social media group.
00:20:02.000Get involved with the people that have been doing this for a long time, that are organized, that have this long-term perspective and this goal to help people.
00:20:10.000We're just trying to be a portal for people to get their stories out for their own healing, but also to get it out so that they get recognition and hopefully it'll change what's going on and they'll be heard and helped.
00:20:26.000Yeah, it's C as in COVID, C19vax, V-A-X, reactions with an S dot com.
00:20:35.000And the reason that I put that up as a website instead of a Facebook is it's a lot harder, at least still today, it's a lot harder to cancel, you know, website domains.
00:20:45.000So it was kind of an easy decision to help them get the word out without the threat of being canceled by a social media giant.
00:20:53.000Ken Rutgers, thank you very much for your courage, for your concern, and for your commitment to people who are injured and to democracy.
00:21:05.000And I can't thank you enough for what you and the rest of the folks at Children's Health Defense, I mean, thank you for being such an advocate for children.