RFK Jr. The Defender - Muzzling NFL Great Ken Ruettgers

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.

00:00:00.000 Welcome everybody.

00:00:01.000 Today we have an amazing guest.

00:00:03.000 We have the football great Ken Rutgers, Green Bay Packers, Hall of Fame, Super Bowl champion, and now medical fairness advocate.

00:00:14.000 Welcome to the show, Ken.

00:00:16.000 Well, thanks.

00:00:16.000 It's great to be here with you, Robert.

00:00:18.000 It's been quite a journey.

00:00:20.000 You're new to this phase, but you've been really courageous in talking about it.

00:00:24.000 So tell us what happened to you.

00:00:26.000 Well, I don't even see it as courageous.

00:00:28.000 I just see it as speaking out on behalf of, really advocating for my wife.

00:00:33.000 So my wife took the first Moderna shot in January.

00:00:36.000 She was, she's working on her master's in counseling.

00:00:39.000 So 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.

00:00:55.000 And in fact, she just had a doctor's appointment yesterday with her neurologist.

00:01:00.000 And it is since her first appointment back in late January, early February.

00:01:04.000 Over the last six months, it's gotten progressively worse, her tingling and numbness.

00:01:09.000 So she joined a group early on and is unable to find answers.

00:01:15.000 So we've both done a lot of research, and that's the beginning of our journey.

00:01:20.000 What day did she get the vaccine? 0.89

00:01:22.000 She got it January 14th.

00:01:23.000 So 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.

00:01:33.000 Some of them have recently been, private groups have been canceled by Facebook.

00:01:37.000 But 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.

00:01:49.000 Did you guys at night?

00:01:50.000 No.

00:01:51.000 No, no.

00:01:53.000 Currently, I teach at a college, but we were doing all the Zoom teaching for the last year and a half, and so I was way down on the list.

00:02:01.000 Quite vaccine-hesitant now, at least.

00:02:05.000 Were you vaccine hesitant at the time?

00:02:07.000 If the vaccine had been available, would you have taken it?

00:02:10.000 I don't think so, because I don't feel like I had enough information.

00:02:15.000 I think, for me personally, I'm looking at COVID and the information provided there.

00:02:21.000 I don't know how accurate it is.

00:02:23.000 Looking at the vaccine information, definitely not a lot of information there, hardly any that would satisfy me.

00:02:30.000 And so it's like, do I roll the dice with COVID?

00:02:33.000 Do I roll the dice with the vaccine?

00:02:36.000 I can't even make an informed decision.

00:02:38.000 So definitely from the beginning, I'm like, I don't know about this stuff.

00:02:42.000 And my wife was hesitant too.

00:02:44.000 But 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.

00:02:58.000 And I think the other thing that bothered me at the time that we talked about was...

00:03:03.000 That it was an experimental...

00:03:04.000 And it was this new...

00:03:06.000 Not even a vaccine.

00:03:08.000 They had to redefine the definition for vaccine to slide it in there.

00:03:11.000 And there's just too many red flags on this thing.

00:03:14.000 Have you been a guy who has always taken care of your health and, you know, interested in kind of functional...

00:03:23.000 Medicine or nutrition and those kind of things, I think you would have maybe a skepticism about new vaccine technology.

00:03:32.000 Well, 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.

00:03:44.000 But yeah, with this new technology, especially the speed at which it was rolled out, I was, it's concerning.

00:03:51.000 Yeah.

00:03:52.000 Where do you live now, Ken?

00:03:54.000 I live in Oregon, in Central Oregon in Bend.

00:03:57.000 I grew up in Bakersfield, California, went to USC, and then played 12 years with the Packers.

00:04:02.000 And so we were in Green Bay.

00:04:04.000 I was 35 years old.

00:04:06.000 I'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.

00:04:30.000 Yeah, so I just got to know John and talk with him just recently through this process.

00:04:37.000 And it's interesting because what took me out of publishing and put me into a different space was advocating for sport career transition.

00:04:46.000 And this is the small world.

00:04:50.000 So John Stockton's brother-in-law, I played next to him for a few years in Green Bay.

00:04:56.000 He ended up in a SWAT standoff and was shot.

00:05:00.000 He was unarmed, shot eight times and died.

00:05:02.000 And a lot of us chalked it up as we talked, guys that played together, chalked it up to challenge identity, status, challenges with transition.

00:05:11.000 And so I left publishing and did full-time work in that sport career transition space.

00:05:17.000 And of course, now the NFL in 2015, they kind of took that on.

00:05:22.000 And so that's when I got my doctorate in sociology, is to do a dissertation on sport career transition.

00:05:28.000 But that was Stockton's brother-in-law.

00:05:31.000 Then 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.

00:05:48.000 You know, we're getting deluged by calls.

00:05:51.000 In 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.

00:05:59.000 Yeah, so currently now it's due to change, right?

00:06:03.000 Because training camp's coming up and the NFL realizes they're having, you know, a lot of high vaccine hesitancy.

00:06:10.000 They're at about 30 or 40% vaccinated rate.

00:06:13.000 And 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.

00:06:35.000 Well, I think back to, you know, I think back and go, well...

00:06:38.000 How are you going to make a team?

00:06:40.000 So 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.

00:06:48.000 Now, 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.

00:06:59.000 And 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.

00:07:09.000 He's not being given a choice.

00:07:11.000 He's being told, you've got to get vaccinated or you're out.

00:07:16.000 And so I think they're even tougher on the coaches than they are on the players.

00:07:20.000 I would guess so, yeah.

00:07:22.000 That's a dilemma.

00:07:24.000 So you got censored.

00:07:26.000 I must have pissed you off.

00:07:28.000 Well, my wife's group did.

00:07:31.000 Now, when she found this group, and it was really, the irony is just dripping these days, right?

00:07:37.000 So 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...

00:07:47.000 She started doing her own research.

00:07:48.000 And 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.

00:07:56.000 And she found an article in Neurology Today that was online.

00:08:00.000 And the irony is that Fauci was in the article saying, quoted as saying, this is a safe and effective shot.

00:08:09.000 And she's sitting there going, what the heck? 0.99

00:08:10.000 It's not in my opinion or experience.

00:08:13.000 And she found a medical doctor that had commented below the article.

00:08:18.000 It was online.

00:08:18.000 And doctor had left her email address.

00:08:21.000 So my wife contacted her.

00:08:23.000 And then they started this small private Facebook group, mostly nurses and doctors that were early takers of the vaccine, right?

00:08:32.000 And of the shot.

00:08:33.000 And they were trying to figure it out.

00:08:36.000 They 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.

00:08:47.000 So 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.

00:09:02.000 And so eventually in May, they got together, again, mostly doctors, and they wrote a letter.

00:09:08.000 And it was a well, well-written letter, kind of asking for help and to be heard and to be seen and to be helped.

00:09:14.000 And they sent it to Janet Woodcock at the FDA and Rochelle Walensky at the CDC and sent it to the White House.

00:09:20.000 And nothing happened.

00:09:22.000 No response.

00:09:24.000 And that was in May, toward the end of May.

00:09:26.000 And of course, I mean, privately, I'm thinking to myself, it's a squeaky...

00:09:31.000 You're trying to be a squeaky wheel, but this is bigger than a bike.

00:09:34.000 This machine that's running down the...

00:09:36.000 This thing squeaks all the time.

00:09:38.000 You guys are going to have to threaten to steal the bike, not just squeak.

00:09:42.000 And so I said, well, let's start a website.

00:09:44.000 So I started a website.

00:09:46.000 My brother and I started a website for them, a space where they could share their stories.

00:09:51.000 And 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.

00:10:01.000 And then I started doing interviews so that they could have a video voice and somebody to ask them like a dialogue.

00:10:08.000 I'm sure when you talk to people, there's a lot of there's a lot of healing power in that.

00:10:13.000 And 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.

00:10:35.000 And I mean, I'm heartbroken.

00:10:36.000 And I'm tearing up just uploading this, and I'm thinking, what is going on with...

00:10:43.000 I know I'm a little late to the game.

00:10:45.000 I get that.

00:10:46.000 I 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.

00:11:00.000 Yeah.

00:11:02.000 And I thought, who could I call?

00:11:06.000 And, you know, Ron Johnson's name came to mind.

00:11:08.000 And I remember some sound bites.

00:11:11.000 He seemed to me like a good man, like a decent human being.

00:11:16.000 And he was from Wisconsin.

00:11:17.000 And so I have that Wisconsin connection to my NFL days.

00:11:21.000 So I called his office and we started talking that night.

00:11:25.000 That was before they threw you off, right?

00:11:28.000 Yeah, I was.

00:11:30.000 Yeah.

00:11:30.000 They were allowing most of those before that.

00:11:34.000 Yeah.

00:11:34.000 So he said, well, why are you interested in this?

00:11:37.000 I said, well, my wife.

00:11:39.000 And of course, I was so overwhelmed that he would even respond.

00:11:42.000 I 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.

00:11:51.000 So he said, well, how about, that was a Thursday.

00:11:54.000 he said, how about on Sunday, we get on Zoom and, you know, have her group of people tell me their stories.

00:12:01.000 And 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.

00:12:11.000 This is how I was before the shot, healthy, active.

00:12:14.000 Then I took the shot on this date and this is what happened after the shot.

00:12:19.000 And you start to see a pattern right now as a sociologist, I'm like going, yeah, hello, there's a pattern here.

00:12:27.000 It's pretty obvious.

00:12:29.000 And, you know, it's like observe pattern.

00:12:31.000 And then you start asking why.

00:12:33.000 And that's kind of where the FDA and the CDC has stopped, at least for now.

00:12:38.000 So then he said, well, would you guys be willing to have your voices heard in Wisconsin at a press conference?

00:12:45.000 And they said yes.

00:12:46.000 And so we went and did that.

00:12:48.000 Now, it was after that press conference in Milwaukee on June 28th.

00:12:53.000 Within a week, one of the private Facebook accounts that my wife was on, 300 people, got canceled.

00:13:00.000 And we're talking, this is their lifeline.

00:13:04.000 The 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?

00:13:14.000 So they're looking for answers.

00:13:15.000 They're looking for diagnosis.

00:13:17.000 They want to be healthy.

00:13:18.000 And all they have is each other on this private group, right?

00:13:22.000 And they get canceled.

00:13:23.000 Another group, a week later, of 10,000 got canceled.

00:13:28.000 Since 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.

00:13:38.000 I was healthy before.

00:13:40.000 I took the shot.

00:13:41.000 My life is turned upside down for either lung, neurological, heart issues, and I can't find any answers.

00:13:50.000 I can't find any help.

00:13:52.000 Help me.

00:13:53.000 The best we can do is, you know, try to get the word out and get the CDC and the FDA and get recognition to study what's going on.

00:14:03.000 Talk a little bit about your relationship with people who are your friends, and are they now writing you off as a nut?

00:14:16.000 A few are, yeah.

00:14:17.000 I mean, they're pretty like, well, I don't know.

00:14:20.000 You know, they're a little standoffish, right?

00:14:22.000 Now, you know, some of them are, they're concerned about my wife, right?

00:14:26.000 But as I, you know, you start talking into that space, and it's like taboo.

00:14:31.000 It's like, I'm like this deviant outlier, weird guy.

00:14:36.000 But that's not our social construction of reality in this country right now.

00:14:40.000 And our government officials, our media, I mean, all these people have also reached out to the media.

00:14:47.000 And, you know, even I reached out to a local, to a regional radio guy.

00:14:51.000 I 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.

00:15:01.000 And Cheryl had, my wife Cheryl had, the day before, send an email, no response.

00:15:06.000 I get a response in 15 minutes.

00:15:08.000 And so they're like, yeah, well, we'd love to talk to your wife.

00:15:12.000 And, you know, and then anytime in the future, if we have football, I said, great, I have no problem with that.

00:15:17.000 Yeah, here's her contact information.

00:15:20.000 Great, we'll get ahold of her. 0.86

00:15:21.000 Two days later, still nothing.

00:15:23.000 Three days later, nothing.

00:15:25.000 So I sent another email.

00:15:26.000 No response.

00:15:28.000 No response.

00:15:29.000 So, 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.

00:15:40.000 It's just, we're in the twilight zone, as you probably know, Robert.

00:15:45.000 Yeah, you know, how about the doctors?

00:15:47.000 Because a lot of people are running into this really weird hostility from doctors.

00:15:53.000 If you even say, I think there's a vaccine injury, you get the doctor who gets it.

00:15:58.000 No, it couldn't be.

00:16:00.000 You know, it's psychological.

00:16:03.000 It's a very, very strange thing from people who are in a profession that's supposed to be about listening about.

00:16:12.000 You know, medicine is about listening to people.

00:16:15.000 It's not about imposing state diktops on people.

00:16:20.000 It's about listening and healing.

00:16:23.000 And 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.

00:16:38.000 Yeah.

00:16:39.000 So in my dozens of interviews that I've done, I'm seeing, again, these patterns.

00:16:44.000 And the typical pattern is I get the shot.

00:16:46.000 I have the reactions.

00:16:47.000 I go to the doctor.

00:16:49.000 Like my wife, oh, we're going to rule out these things because that's what we do in our medicine. 0.93

00:16:54.000 We're going to rule out MS. We're going to rule out Parkinson's.

00:16:57.000 So my wife got an MRI on her brain.

00:16:59.000 She She got an MRI on her spine.

00:17:00.000 She did blood work. 1.00

00:17:02.000 She did one of those tilt tests for POTS. She did a skin biopsy.

00:17:07.000 Very 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.

00:17:19.000 So I see these symptoms.

00:17:20.000 I think it's this.

00:17:21.000 I test for this, and it's not.

00:17:23.000 And 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.

00:17:40.000 I'm a social scientist, but I'm not a medical doctor, so I'm This is what I'm hearing.

00:17:44.000 And I have had also nurses and PAs that I've talked to.

00:17:48.000 And what's going on there?

00:17:49.000 I talked to a PA who was a PA in a hospital.

00:17:53.000 And what they're seeing, as an example, the rural county that this PA's hospital was in was about 40% vaccinated.

00:18:02.000 And 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.

00:18:16.000 Now, there's a correlative.

00:18:17.000 I 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...

00:18:26.000 They're not.

00:18:27.000 And 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?

00:18:37.000 How can we help our patients?

00:18:39.000 And the other conversation that was going on is, what's going to happen if this thing becomes a mandatory requirement for employment?

00:18:47.000 Facebook shut that group down to 900 people.

00:18:50.000 These are people that are trying to help sick people.

00:18:54.000 Again, tell our listeners how people can support you.

00:18:58.000 Well, I mean, we're trying to figure out how we can support people.

00:19:02.000 I mean, we're trying to be advocates to get your voice out, right?

00:19:06.000 So if you want to post your story, come on the website and there's a place you can post your story.

00:19:13.000 I mean, I wish we had...

00:19:14.000 The magic pill.

00:19:15.000 What we're trying to do is work as hard as we can to get as many voices out in the public space and get recognized, right?

00:19:24.000 And the big battle cry, and mostly women for the neurological. 1.00

00:19:28.000 I mean, it's really interesting.

00:19:30.000 We're doing good.

00:19:31.000 We 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.

00:19:43.000 And 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.

00:19:53.000 So we're just trying to help.

00:19:54.000 But one of the things I've told That I'm telling the people in the group and that's starting to, is like, join these other groups.

00:20:00.000 Join Children's Health Defense.

00:20:02.000 Get 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.

00:20:10.000 We'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.

00:20:23.000 Tell us what your website is.

00:20:26.000 Yeah, it's C as in COVID, C19vax, V-A-X, reactions with an S dot com.

00:20:35.000 And 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.

00:20:45.000 So 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.

00:20:53.000 Ken Rutgers, thank you very much for your courage, for your concern, and for your commitment to people who are injured and to democracy.

00:21:04.000 Well, you're welcome.

00:21:05.000 And 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.

00:21:15.000 Thanks, Ken.

00:21:16.000 Thank you, guys.

00:21:17.000 All right.

RFK Jr. The Defender - July 18, 2021

Muzzling NFL Great Ken Ruettgers

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