Much ado about a China trade deal
11:19 Share

When Ram won its first Motor Trend Truck of the Year, it was celebrated. But after seven times, what's left to say? The trophy speaks for itself. And now, so does the deal with Employee Pricing Plus. Stop by your local dealer today and take home a Ram truck. Ram, seven-time Motor Trend Truck of the Year. Nothing stops Ram.

Offer valid on select 2024 and 2025 Rams for non-FCA employees and retirees. $200 admin fee applies. Not all buyers will qualify. Restrictions apply. Does not apply to leases. See dealer for details and 63025. Ram is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC. Hi, everyone. It's Neil Scarborough, Marketplace's general manager with an important message. The recent rescission package being weighed by Congress threatens to cut a billion dollars in federal funding for public media.

If you want to voice your opposition to these efforts and keep programming like Marketplace on the air, please consider contacting your congressional representatives to tell them that public media matters to you. You can learn more at marketplace.org slash action. Let us do the show. All right, let's do it. Hey, everyone. I'm Rima Grace. Welcome back to Making Me Smart, where we make today make sense. And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. It is Wednesday, June the 11th.

All right, today we're going to get into some news and then some smiles later on. Kimberly, what caught your attention today? I have a news story that is not so much a news story as it's being made out to be because President Trump has announced his deal with China. And this has been happening over and over again with this administration. I'm losing track of things. It's just so much back and forth.

Exactly, where, you know, push something really far in one direction, and then when you roll it back, it's a deal. So in this case, this agreement is between the United States and China to basically stop some of the tit-for-tat, you know, tariffs and penalties. Not tariffs, because the tariffs are staying the same, but some of the sort of punishments that they were doing with each other. So Trump made...

The decision, President Trump had made the decision to say ban Chinese students from coming to the United States. That's being rolled back. China retaliated, saying that, you know, you can't have our rare earth minerals. That's being rolled back. And just the whole point of doing these things was to put pressure on China related to tariffs. And it didn't work. And so...

We're still waiting for, you know, details of this air quote deal. And but what it doesn't seem to be changing much is the actual tariffs or the trade situation between the United States and China. So we're getting more details. Maybe it's going to be there. Yeah, I saw I saw someone on Blue Sky post something saying,

That said, so the deal is basically what was going on before Liberation Day, which was also announced in the handshake deal last month with China. But now Trump is saying that Chinese students can go to school here, which was always the case until just recently when Trump said he would be banning them. Yeah, that. Yeah, right. That captures it. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Anyway, what's your news? So my news, I wanted to talk about something that happened earlier this week with the CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee.

Earlier this week, we saw that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed an expert panel of vaccine advisors. These are people who've historically guided the CDC when it comes to vaccine recommendations. So they say, you know, who should get what shots when. And Kennedy fired them because he said this group, which is made up of 17 people, is plagued with conflicts of interest and he's going to be replacing them with new members. This is a big deal. And we've we've.

This is unprecedented. It's causing a lot of panic among doctors and scientists. But at the same time, it does make sense with what we know about Kennedy. He's someone who's been skeptical of the medical establishment. He has accused it, accuses it of serving corporate interests over patient health. And he sees mainstream scientists like the ones that are staffed on this panel as being too aligned with pharma companies. And so he also wants them to consider the potential harmful effects of vaccines, even though they've been widely debunked.

So I'll just say that this is someone who's already taken actions that bypass expert guidance, right? So this move is causing more distrust and more confusion. And, you know, personally, when I'm seeing these headlines, I don't know what's going through your head, Kimberly, but I keep thinking of just how will we know which vaccines to get? Like, are healthcare professionals going to follow the CDC guidelines? How are insurance companies going to navigate conflicting views and recommendations on vaccines? Right?

And so I've seen multiple doctors recommend that people consult with other professional medical societies like the American Academy of Pediatrics or just to consult directly with their doctors themselves. But yeah, things at the CDC are not looking great, to say the least. Yeah, it will be interesting to see where people go for information. Like I've been seeing a lot of stuff on social media where people are trying to elevate food recalls as they come up because there's a lot of...

There's been a lot of staffing cuts in the Food and Drug Administration and the USDA, and there seems to be a bit less publicity around some of these things than maybe they would have been getting in the past. And so...

People are turning to alternative sources of information to see what's going on with the food supply. And I have to imagine that some of these medical associations and groups like you mentioned that would kind of just defer to the CDC in the past will probably have to adjust their missions to hopefully be more public facing and public serving. Yeah. And the thing I keep thinking about, too, is that this kind of chaos exists.

It doesn't impact people equally, right? So people with access to good health care probably will be okay. You know, they can find these resources that we're mentioning or talk with their doctors. But people in under-resourced areas who rely on federal guidance because maybe they don't have the time or the money to doctor shop or, you know, find the right information, it just leads to...

more avoidance potentially, delayed, you know, care, skip to vaccines, just creates more anxiety. And so we'll see, we'll see who gets replaced, but presumably they'll be more aligned with how Kennedy thinks. And I think there will probably be some additional knock-on effects because the CDC guidelines around vaccines, around medicines and vaccines

and treatment regimens and things like that inform what other federal agencies, particularly federal health care agencies, might do and or cover in terms of some of the programs like Medicaid and Medicare. It also informs how insurance companies decide what they will cover. And so there's definitely going to be some knock-on economic consequences of this. All right, what you got for us? I guess we have to move on to smiles. Yes, smiles. Yeah, let's smile.

What am I smiling about? This actually did make me smile. It was in the Wall Street Journal this morning about an 84-year-old woman who has a pony named Diamond that she treks, I believe, 500 miles, 600 miles from northern England to Scotland each year. She makes this annual voyage of sorts. So she, it's just, there was this line in the article where it says, she says, some people say I'm brave. My sister thinks I'm an idiot.

Which I thought was funny. She, yeah, she's had two knee surgeries. She is blind in one eye and yet she makes this voyage every year where she packs some instant noodles. She has her dog in her carrier bag and just disconnects from the world. And I thought that was amusing. I also...

It was a little envious to be that disconnected from the world. She said she doesn't even read the news while we're over here doom scrolling and have our phones glued to our bodies. And she's just trotting along the countryside. Man, what a life. What a life. I know, right? I wonder what the first journey was like versus, you know, and how it's changed over time. She's probably seen that landscape change so much. I know.

you know, people that she probably sees on a regular, you know, once a year, whenever she's going through. That's really cool. That's fun. She apparently started it when she was in her 30s. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. I'm just doing some math here. So she started in her 30s, 50 years ago. Yeah, at least 50 years. Okay.

Yeah, that's cool. I also have an animal adjacent story. Oh, yeah, you do. This just made me chuckle. This is a story in Roll Call about a giant moose.

Stuffed moose, not taxidermied, like a giant stuffed animal moose that apparently comes to Capitol Hill every year because they do like a New Hampshire business profile every year. And so they bring in all these like New Hampshire goods and like hot sauce and beer and handmade furniture, but also a giant moose.

stuffed moose. It's huge. Again, not taxidermied. And you have to go look at the pictures of this. And there's, this story is just fun about how they have to try to maneuver it through the Capitol building. The moose's name is Marty, by the way. And they have to like detach its antlers and then screw them back on. It's just fun. And I was like, yeah, I could, I could do with a giant stuffed moose. Why not? I'm trying to, maybe I'll go down there and see it.

So the point is to showcase like homegrown businesses or just to promote the state? Yeah, just to promote the state, visit New Hampshire, that type stuff. It's an eight foot tall moose, FYI. And also that travels along with him is Kodak the bear, who is six inches shorter. Oh my gosh. Yes, it's the annual Experience New Hampshire event in the Russell Senate office building. I mean, I guess it's working. We're talking about it.

I know, right? Hey, promotion works. I just, yeah, I needed a smile. Stuffed animals, that'll do it. Especially when it's not a taxidermied animal. Don't want a taxidermied moose. No. All right. That is it for us today. In case you missed us talking about this yesterday, next week we're going to spend the whole week unpacking the GOP's reconciliation bill. And so if you have a question about any of the components...

In it, whether it be about the tax rates or the Medicaid cuts, the border security and immigration components of the legislation, what it's going to do to the debt and the deficit, any of that kind of stuff, health care, student loans. Let us know. We're going to try to answer as many questions as we have because this thing is big.

Yes, yes. Please send us your questions. We want to hear from you. You can send us a voice memo to makemesmartatmarketplace.org or you can leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSMART. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker and today's program was engineered by Charlton Thorpe. Daisy Palacios is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Fargali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows. And Joanne Griffith is our chief content officer. Hi, I'm Katie Drummond.

I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director, and I'm excited to be joining the hosts of our flagship podcast, Uncanny Valley.

It's a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. It's hosted by some amazing Wired writers and editors, where each week they discuss the influence of technology and culture from the Valley on our everyday lives. But we're also adding another episode to that feed, hosted by me. Each week, I'll have an urgent conversation with one of our extremely busy Wired reporters or editors about this week in news. ♪

Our journalists are constantly asking smart questions to find out where they lead and to help you understand where the world is going a little bit better. I hope this new weekly episode does just that. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.