Trump Tries and (Mostly) Fails to Control the Narrative on Iran. Plus, RFK Jr. is Bad for Our Health
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After dropping bombs on Iran, President Trump is fighting to control the narrative. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger. Robert F. Kennedy's revamped Vaccine Advisory Committee met for the first time this week, and they're making changes. CDC's immunization panel voted 5-1 today to recommend against flu vaccines containing thimerosal.

It's the first step in RFK Jr.'s project to reshape public health in accordance with his own singular views and priorities. He doesn't believe in the germ theory. He doesn't believe that the treatment or prevention of germs will be life-saving. He's talking about taking red dye out of Skittles and destroying vaccine programs. That's not making us healthy. It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. There is some cautious optimism in the Middle East as the fragile Iran-Israel ceasefire seems to be holding right now. After bombing each other for 12 days, including an attack by the United States on Iranian nuclear sites and a telegraphed Iranian response, a ceasefire was announced by President Donald Trump.

The U.S. joined the fray last weekend, naming its air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities Operation Midnight Hammer. And in the days since that, there's been an all-out war over words and narratives waged against the press and the American intelligence community. The United States has bombed Iran's main nuclear facilities in what Donald Trump hailed as a very successful attack. Before the dust had settled, perhaps literally, the president and his allies had begun their victory lap.

Trump fired off an opening salvo with a post on Truth Social featuring the words, quote, Fordo is gone. Sean Hannity of Fox News shared a social media post with that same phrase to his some six million followers, along with a video of a large explosion.

But that clip, as the BBC and Wired quickly deduced, was actually from Syria in 2024. The bogus video was viewed some five million times before Hannity deleted it. It was very...

The president speaking at a NATO summit on Wednesday. But some cracks in the official narrative began to emerge when CNN's Natasha Bertrand broke this story Wednesday.

So this is an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the Pentagon's intelligence arm. What we are told is that based on the assessments of the damage that these bombs implemented on these nuclear sites, that as of right now, it does not appear that they ended or obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Instead, they only set it back by months.

Short on evidence to disprove it, the president and his buddies at Fox reached for their usual ad hominem jabs and misdirection. The same people who were saying the bunker busters didn't blow up are the ones who said Trump was a Russian agent. Trump says Natasha Byrntrand should be fired and thrown out of the building like a dog. President Trump is accusing Democrats of leaking that low confidence intelligence report regarding the damage done to Iran's nuclear facilities. The

The president posted on Truth Social they should all be prosecuted. And then later that day, new intel entered the chat from the top dog at the CIA. Let me start with this new assessment from the CIA director, John Radcliffe, who now says evidence shows Iran's nuclear program was severely damaged. So the DIA and the CIA appear to disagree on the facts.

And it could be weeks till we get a fuller picture as the Pentagon gathers more information and shares it with the press.

Still, there are other important questions about the strike yet to be nailed down, like whether a significant target of the attacks, Iran's enriched uranium supply, was even in these bombed sites. As Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told NPR, satellite images taken in the days leading up to the strikes indicate that Tehran may have outmaneuvered the American bunker bombers.

One of the really interesting things I see is that the Iranians had time to bring trucks to the facility, which

which I presume allowed them to shut things down and remove things. And then they buried the entrances to both facilities with dirt to protect them. Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordow Mountain or some of it? Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved? Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin questioning her former colleague, now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Of course, we're watching every single aspect. But Jennifer, you've been about the worst.

the one who misrepresents the most intentionally. I take issue with that. I appreciate you acknowledging that. Her professionalism, her knowledge, and her experience at the Pentagon is unmatched. Brit Hume, Fox chief political analyst, defending Griffin on Thursday. And I

In the same week that his favorite cable network was pushing back on his administration, the president was struggling to mediate between two nations poised to commit more violence. And it seemed like maybe the pressure was getting to him. That ceasefire nearly collapsed today. Just hours after President Trump first announced the Israel-Iran ceasefire, this morning they exchanged fire again.

prompting the president to drop a rhetorical bomb as he vented frustration. We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f***.

But let's get back to the real American bombs. According to the New York Times, Trump had made the decision to join Israel's offensive last week in part after seeing how well it was, quote, playing on Fox News, whose hosts and guests were practically salivating over the war. Right now, America's greatest ally in the Middle East, Israel, making the world a safer place as brand new video shows Israeli forces striking more than 150 people.

The Iranian people want a regime change. The main justification from the White House for targeting Iran in the first place was the imminent threat of a nuke. I've been saying for 20 years, maybe longer, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I've been saying it for a long time.

And I think they were a few weeks away from having one. Pundits on Fox, MSNBC and CNN echoed the president's words. The United States bombed Iran's nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear weapons program. Is it totally obliterated or is it not? Is there any of this weapons program left at all? There's actually quite a bit of debate about whether there was a weapons program at all.

Iran definitely has a nuclear program, ostensibly for civilian energy. Senator Mark Kelly on NPR this week. They were not actually building a weapon. Our big concern was the amount of enriched uranium that they had, which was much more than what they needed for a civilian nuclear power. As CNN reported several days before the strikes, some American intelligence had concluded that Iran was not actively trying to build a nuke,

and was up to three years off from being able to produce one. PolitiFact has cited other estimates ranging from months to two years. This is what Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said under oath in March. The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.

The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons. What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your intelligence community has said they have no evidence that they are at this point. Well, then my intelligence community is wrong. Trump speaking with a reporter at his Bedminster Golf Club a day before Operation Midnight Hammer. Who in the intelligence community said that? Your Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. She's wrong.

Just guess what Tulsi Gabbard did this week. Tulsi Gabbard just tweeted, the dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months. To be clear, her testimony was taken nearly verbatim from a 30-page annual threat assessment, a written consensus from 18 agencies intended to help guide policy makers.

Because remember, Congress is authorized to declare war, not the White House. The kicker to all of this is that actually, according to a number of experts, bombing Iran could be the sort of aggression that makes Iran think twice. Senator Mark Kelly. This could be the moment that they make a decision that.

to start building a bomb and further enriching that uranium. At time of recording, there is still a ceasefire. So let's take this moment to learn the lesson that we should have learned from the last time we preemptively attacked a Middle East state that our leaders claimed was housing weapons of mass destruction. Do not fall for the spin. Mr. Vice President, thank you for joining us. The big question is the United States now at war with Iran?

Wars are not waged against nuclear programs or militaries or terrorists or hostile nations. Wars are waged against people, civilians included.

— 28 people were killed across Israel during the course of the conflict. Four of them yesterday, just before that ceasefire came into force. — The Iranian Ministry of Health said the number of people killed in the attacks by Israel is around 500. — This Iranian official said these casualties included women, children, scientists, students, musicians.

So often our advice on this show is to wait until good information emerges. In times of war, especially, this administration will inject its predictable venom. For the press, and for the rest of us, the best antidote is patience. Coming up, taking your eye off of HHS may be hazardous to your health. This is On The Media.

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This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. So, a couple of weeks ago... Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he is replacing the entire independent committee that advises the CDC on vaccine usage, claiming members had too many outside conflicts. He announced these eight new picks, most of whom are either allies of him or have clearly criticized COVID-19 vaccines and requirements of vaccine safety in the past.

He also removed all of the career officials who sort of set the guardrails around this process, who set the agenda, who vet them, who planned the meetings. All those people are gone, too. This week, RFK Jr.'s revamped Vaccine Advisory Committee made its presence known.

CDC's immunization panel voted 5-1 today to recommend against flu vaccines containing thimerosal. Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative used in multi-dose vials to prevent contamination. Though some anti-vaccine advocates continue to spread misinformation that there's a link between the preservative and autism, it's just not true.

The panel's decision came after one presentation, not by the usual CDC process where, you know, the staff of the CDC convene all these experts to really vet the evidence and come to a conclusion about what the impact and need for certain changes in the recommendations are. But instead, it was a presentation by Lynn Redwood. She's the former head of Children's Health Defense. That's a group that a lot of folks have criticized as anti-vaccine and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the founder of.

She is concerned, and she aired a lot of those debunked concerns about thimerosal at today's vaccine meeting. Lynn Redwood believes childhood vaccines containing thimerosal led to her son's autism. Reportedly, RFK Jr. is hiring her to work in the CDC's Vaccine Safety Office.

No surprise there. When he took office back in February as Secretary of Health and Human Services, which leads the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Center for Disease Control, he said this. There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

Vaccines are inherently unsafe. You cannot make them safe. But don't worry. According to the White House's Maha report published in May, you can rest assured that this administration will be investigating the effects of fluoride and cell phones, which it claims has lowered our collective IQs and sperm counts, respectively.

At a congressional meeting this week, he also said that portable sensors and monitors are really what'll keep us in the pink. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years. But will they be the greatest life-saving intervention in the history of modern medicine?

Well, not according to leading medical experts. That would be vaccines. This week, Kennedy's restaffed CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, met for the first time. The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive, and what most of us in this room receive when we are children. New chair Martin Kulldorff on Wednesday.

We will be establishing a work group that will look at the cumulative childhood vaccine schedule as well as the adolescent schedule. Dr.

Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and a physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He's also co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine. He served on ACIP, that Vaccine Advisory Committee. What's it actually do? So if a company, for example, has a vaccine they think is safe and effective, they submit it to the FDA.

The FDA, if they agree, will license it. Now it can be sold. But it's really the CDC and specifically the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, that recommends it. Insurance companies won't cover a vaccine until the ACIP says, OK, here's who should get it.

So let's consider the COVID vaccine for pregnant women. ACIP recommended it before RFK Jr. stood up in a video on X. He says, "I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.

We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again. And then it dropped off the immunization schedule. Right. So we know that women who are infected with COVID and pregnant

are one and a half to two times more likely to be hospitalized, to require intensive care unit admission and ventilation and die than women of the same age who have COVID who aren't pregnant. That's why the World Health Organization recommends it. That's why every country in this world recommends that vaccine for pregnant people. And it's why the CDC recommended it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally and behind closed doors simply made a decision that he didn't want to recommend this vaccine for pregnant people. So it dropped off the immunization schedule. Now the question is, will insurance companies cover it? Will physicians or pharmacists feel that they are exposed to some liability if they give a vaccine which is not recommended? It certainly does nothing to make America healthy again. All it does is put pregnant women at unnecessary risk. Well, how did RFK Jr. justify it?

He wrote a letter to Congress, a so-called frequently asked questions letter. And he said that, look, here's all this evidence that pregnant people, when they get a COVID vaccine, are more likely to have miscarriage, more likely to have placental blood clots.

And if you looked actually at the papers that he referenced, they said exactly the opposite. Those papers showed that pregnant people who receive a vaccine are not more likely to have a miscarriage, not more likely to have preterm labor, not more likely to have placental blood clots. It was all exactly the opposite of what he had said in that memo that he sent to members of Congress. I assume he counted on the fact that no one in Congress would actually read the papers. It was that cynical and frankly dishonest.

A couple of weeks ago, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline HHS Moves to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines, where he announced that he was retiring, which is to say firing all 17 members of ACIP. You are on.

that committee from 1998 to 2003. What do you make of his claim that, quote, most of ACIP's members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines? To be on the ACIP, you have to declare any potential conflict of interest. So, for example, if you're part of a data safety monitoring board for a company on a vaccine, you

You have to declare that. And you wouldn't be allowed to vote on that product nor any product that that company made. No one has a conflict of interest that would in any way influence their vote. So he completely made it up. It was a bogus claim. And what he should do is he should list each of those 17 members of the ACIP and say specifically what it is that they're being fired for. He didn't do that because he couldn't do that, because he didn't have a leg to stand on regarding his false allegation.

So at Kennedy's confirmation hearing for the job he now has, Republican Senator William Cassidy, a doctor, he expressed clear concern in his questioning of the nominee. Fear of autism is a major driver for vaccine hesitancy among those with a college education or higher. Influenced by Internet, social media narratives over physician-based vaccine information.

There's a lot of people that look to you for, do I get vaccinated or not? I'm a doc. Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, the influencer for people to believe, no, there's 1.25 million kids studied and there's no autism associated with measles. He ultimately cast a key vote for Kennedy after having received this assurance.

It confirmed he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes. He immediately broke that promise. He stood up and said, I'm changing the recommendation for pregnant people. I'm no longer recommending they get a COVID vaccine. I'm changing the recommendation for young children. I'm no longer recommending they get a vaccine.

He went on to say that he had agreed, according to Senator William Cassidy from Louisiana, that he wouldn't alter these committees and then proceeded to fire 17 members on a committee and stock that committee with people who were like-minded to him, which is to say had an anti-vaccine bent or an anti-science bent. So could you run through some of the new members of the ACIP, who they are, what they believe, and want to start with Vicki Pebsworth?

Vicki Pebsworth is a member of the National Vaccine Information Center, which is an anti-vaccine group. She has for decades been lobbying states to eliminate school entry requirements for vaccines. So she's a well-known anti-vaccine activist. How about Dr. Robert Malone? He went on Joe Rogan's podcast in February of 2022. He said this stuff about the COVID vaccine.

Our government is out of control. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They're explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report. They are flat out illegal and they don't care. Hopefully, we're going to be able to stop them before they take our kids.

The interview was at the center of that controversy when a handful of big-name artists, Neil Young was among them, left Spotify in protest of the streaming service continuing to carry the Joe Rogan experience. What has Malone been saying recently?

Robert Malone is an MD who's also a scientist and in the late 1980s published papers in an excellent journal called the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences looking at mRNA and predicted accurately that mRNA could be used as a drug. mRNA could be used as a vaccine.

And then something happened to Robert Malone. I don't know what it was, but he now puts out information that's clearly wrong. He testified in front of Congress that the mRNA COVID vaccines caused cancer, caused heart attacks, caused autoimmune disease, all of which is clearly untrue. Anyone who listened to him, either in that congressional hearing or on Joe Rogan's show, would be misled to make a bad decision for themselves or their child. There's no question that he is an anti-vaccine activist who now is on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices

And we'll be giving advice to this country about what vaccines they should or shouldn't get. How about the Swedish biostatistician Martin Kulldorff? Like Robert Malone, Martin Kulldorff has testified as an expert witness on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s lawsuits against Merck, specifically in the case of Kulldorff, his lawsuit against the human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil.

He was a principal author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which said we should just let this virus run wild after natural immunity. We'll be much better off thus putting people in harm's way unnecessarily.

And how about Retsef Levy? He's a new face on the panel. He's part of an Israeli anti-vax group. And he has a pinned video on X where he says, I'm filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time, all COVID mRNA vaccination program should stop immediately because they completely failed

to fulfill any of their advertised promise regarding efficacy. And more importantly, they should stop because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level of harm, including the death

of young people and children. Where did he get that from? Not from any good data. What's amazing to me is, if you'd asked me at the beginning of this pandemic, how did I think vaccines would be viewed, I would imagine they would have been viewed as what they are, which is lifesavers. I mean, here's a virus that came into this country in early 2020. We isolated it, sequenced it. Within 11 months, we did two large prospective placebo-controlled trials, 40,000 people for Pfizer, 30,000 people for Moderna.

to show that the vaccine was safe and effective. Then within the next seven months, we distributed it to 70% of the U.S. population, a remarkable achievement, and no doubt saved about 3 million lives. And at least 250,000 people who chose not to get this vaccine chose to end their life.

I think, frankly, it is the greatest scientific or medical achievement that has occurred in my lifetime, and my lifetime includes the development of the polio vaccine. We, somewhere in 2021, created this enormous backlash against vaccines that allow people like Martin Kaldorf to make the kind of misstatements he makes about vaccines. He published a paper that was methodologically horribly flawed, claiming that it basically caused heart deaths in young people, and that's still out there. This notion that this vaccine killed healthy young athletes is just raw.

And he is the executive director now, the head of the ACIP. When you have someone talking about a vaccine killing children, causing sudden heart attacks, no wonder people are scared. It's a shame because people are still at risk. People are still getting hospitalized and dying from this virus. This virus isn't going anywhere. It's going to be with us for decades, if not centuries. And right now, because there's so much misinformation and disinformation out there, we're putting people in harm's way. The irony of all this is,

is this group of people who have specifically been putting this in harm's way will now be making recommendations. The anti-vaccine activists have been around for decades, if not arguably centuries, since the first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, and they have been shouting from the sidelines. Now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, they are making policy.

And he might use the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to cash in. This is a program that was created to let the government compensate people who can make a claim that they were injured by a vaccine rather than putting undue pressure on manufacturers. If you really want to destroy vaccine programs in this country, all you have to do is mess around with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

Because in the early 1980s, there was this false notion that the whooping cough or pertussis vaccine caused permanent brain damage. Subsequent studies showed that that wasn't true, that while the pertussis vaccine could cause fever and could cause even febrile seizures, short-term seizures, that never caused permanent harm. Studies showed that. But it led to a flood of litigation. In 1980, there were 18 companies that made vaccines. By the end of that decade, there were four.

because they were all driven off the market by litigation. Now, the Reagan administration stepped in in 1986, created the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which included the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which at least stopped the bleeding.

But mess around with that program, which is what RFK Jr., I think, is about to do. He just hired a law firm from Arizona that had an expertise in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. All you have to do is just add things to the list of compensable injuries, even if they aren't actual injuries caused by the vaccine, or worse, take certain vaccines out of that protection of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, put them in front of the slings and arrows of outrageous civil litigation, and you will drive them out of the business because it's a fragile market.

Vaccines are something you give once or a few times in your lifetime. They are never going to compete with drugs like lipid-lowering agents or neurological drugs or psychiatric drugs. And so make it onerous enough for these companies to make vaccines, and they'll leave the business. So pharmaceutical companies really don't see vaccines as a cash cow. You are a doctor who created a vaccine that was licensed for use back in 2006. Did you make a bundle?

First of all, myself and Stanley Placken and Fred Clark are the three co-inventors of this vaccine, the so-called RotaTek vaccine, which has pretty much eliminated since 2006 the 70,000 hospitalizations caused by severe dehydration from that virus every year and is estimated to save about 165,000 lives every year in the developing world. That was the reward.

And although Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused me of voting myself rich when I was on the ACIP, it should be noted that I was off the ACIP for three years by the time that vaccine came up for a vote. And although I am a co-patent holder on that vaccine, I worked at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and therefore am their intellectual property. So they own the patent, not me.

But how would Kennedy get rich? Because he's a lawyer? He would get rich from suing. That's what he's been doing. The last few years, he made $2.5 million whilst trying to sue Merck for Gardasil. And he does it with his personal injury lawyer friends, like the law firm of Wisner-Baum. And to Elizabeth Warren's credit, if you actually watch her sort of four or five-minute videos,

questioning of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she said you could do this. You can publish your anti-vaccine conspiracies, but this time on U.S. government letterhead. You could tell the CDC vaccine panel to remove a particular vaccine from the vaccine schedule. You could remove vaccines from special compensation programs, which would open up manufacturers to mass torts.

You could make more injuries eligible for compensation, even if there is no causal evidence. You could change vaccine court processes to make it easier to bring junk lawsuits. There's a lot of ways that you can influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits while you are Secretary of HHS. And I'm asking you to commit right now that you will not take a financial stake in

And every one of those lawsuits so that what you do as secretary will also benefit you financially down the line. Kennedy's new ACIP had its first meeting this week and on the agenda was something that may not mean a lot to lay people, but it means a lot to those people in the vaccine skeptic community. It was a presentation regarding thimerosal in vaccines.

blamed for causing autism, right? Right. So I was on the ACIP from 1998 to 2003. This was considered then. We were adding more and more vaccines to the vaccine schedule. As some of those vaccines contained the ethylmercury preservative thimerosal, there was a concern that children were being exposed to too much mercury and that that might cause harm.

Now, there were a number of studies that were done at the time to show that the mercury-contained vaccines did not add in any appreciable way to the amount of mercury that you normally have in your bloodstream because we live on this planet and anything made from water on this planet, including breast milk and infant formula and anything made from water, contains methylmercury. And that has a much longer half-life than ethylmercury, which is what's in thimerosal. So you knew that it didn't contribute in any important way to what you already were exposed to.

You already had studies that were done at that time because Western Europe took thimerosal out of vaccines in the early 90s. There were Canadian provinces that used thimerosal-containing vaccines right next to Canadian provinces that used the same vaccines that didn't contain thimerosal. And you saw that there was no difference in neurodevelopmental outcomes, including autism.

Ironically, the incidence of autism at that time was 1 in 150. Thimerosal was taken out of vaccines by 2001 for young children. Today, the incidence of autism is 1 in 32. So the incidence of autism since removing thimerosal from vaccines has increased dramatically. Why the rise in autism? I read it was because of the way it's been reclassified in the DSM.

I think that's probably the most important thing, which is that the definition has been broadened from sort of more profound autism to autism spectrum disorder. I think there are also better diagnostic tools. I think there's increased recognition of that disorder, hence the increase. But I think it certainly has nothing to do with vaccines.

So flu vaccines were reduced from multi-dose vials to single doses in response to this fear over thimerosal? That's exactly right. By going from multi-dose vials to single-dose vials, that became an issue of storage because it's easier to store a multi-dose vial. It also became an issue of expense. So the vaccines therefore became less expensive.

available and more expensive. And for the developing world, it was really tragic because that increase in price really affected them more than anyone else. But there was a child who died of hepatitis B because the mother was so scared of thimerosal that she refused to give the vaccine. And so thimerosal was taken out of vaccines as, quote, the precautionary principle. But the precautionary principle, which is exercising an abundance of caution, assumes no harm. But we did do harm.

Two anti-vaccine groups were created by that episode, Generation Rescue or Moms Against Mercury, were created because any reasonable person looking at what the CDC did at that time, which was precipitously taking thimerosal out of vaccines, could reasonably say, well, they wouldn't have done it unless it was harmful. But it wasn't harmful. I think probably the best quote at the time, because it was the most ironic, came from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which stated, all the evidence to date

shows that thimerosal at the level contained in vaccines is safe. But to make safe vaccines even safer, we're going to ask companies to take it out. Well, if it's safe, taking it out doesn't make it safer. All it does is make it perceived to be safer, which is a very different thing.

Although if it enables people to take it more readily, I guess that's a benefit. I would argue the opposite was true, Brooke, because we scared people about vaccines. I mean, the sense was, you know, these people don't know what they're doing. They're putting it in, they're taking it out. If anything, we lessened vaccines uptake because we scared them about this harmless vaccine.

See, the problem is it's called ethyl mercury, and mercury never sounds good. It's not like there's the National Center for the Appreciation of Heavy Metal standing up in defense of mercury. Kennedy edited a book about thimerosal, didn't he? It was called Thimerosal, Let the Science Speak.

In which the science didn't get a chance to speak. That's right. What else is on the ACIP agenda besides reviewing thimerosal and flu vaccines? Aren't RSV vaccines both for adults and kids on that docket? Right. So respiratory syncytial virus is a respiratory virus that in young babies causes bronchiolitis, which is inflammation of the small breathing tubes in the lung.

It's actually the most common reason for a baby to come into the hospital, typically children less than three months of age. So because very young children get this virus and occasionally are admitted to the hospital, so much so that we have 60,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations a year and 100 to 300 deaths a year, we have a vaccine for pregnant mothers. So then they develop an immune response. They passively transfer through the placenta the antibodies which will protect that child in the first six months of life.

There's another vaccine that's given to babies in the first few days of life called Nersivimab that is a long-acting monoclonal antibody that also protects against respiratory syncytial virus. So what's interesting is that the CDC published data recently looking at the effect of this because it's really just in the past year, 2024 to 2025, that we've had those two products.

So they compared, how are we doing? Are we decreasing hospitalizations in babies as compared to, say, pre-pandemic 2018 to 2020? And the answer was yes. There's been more than a 50% decrease in little babies getting admitted to the hospital. In fact, it actually decreased the infant mortality rate. It was that impactful. So what are they doing? Are they going to prefer the maternal vaccine versus the monoclonal antibody or vice versa? I don't know. That's the problem.

there's such chaos now. But at least the data's there, right? Right, but I have a friend in the respiratory diseases branch who told me specifically that HHS, i.e., Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

told the respiratory diseases branch not to do what they would normally do when you would get data that impactful. Normally what you would do is you would embargo the study for a day. You would send out talking points to a variety of media outlets. You would give those media outlets a chance to interview the authors or to talk to people at the CDC before the paper was released. And then that would create more impact for the paper. They were told not to do that at all, to essentially suppress that information. And in many ways,

That's what worries me the most. Although this committee worries me, many in the medical and scientific community will not trust them, there are other committees. I mean, the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, has its Committee of Infectious Diseases, which is composed of experts, which also gives recommendations, who have been talking to insurance companies. So that doesn't worry me as much. What worries me more is whether the data that you're getting from the CDC will be manipulated or suppressed.

There's an old W.H. Auden quote, which is, when all the mass and majesty of this world, when all they carried weight and always weighed the same, lay in the hands of others, they were small and could not hope for help, and no help came. And that's what I feel like this is.

We're at a time when people declare their own truths, including scientific truths. Normally, we rely on good scientific evidence to make decisions. And now you're having people, specifically Lynn Redwood from Safe Minds, which is an anti-vaccine group, present about thimerosal at this meeting. A virulent anti-vaccine activist. Everything that used to matter doesn't seem to matter anymore. Coming up, how all this is likely to play out. This is On The Media.

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This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, veteran Fox News anchor Brett Baier on his relationship with President Trump. Does President Trump call you on the phone a lot? He calls me. And you call him?

I have called him. He wants to be front and center in every story. And he is front and center in every story. Brett Baer joins me on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm talking with Paul Offit, a physician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, about how Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. has taken a wrecking ball to the CDC's Vaccine Advisory Committee, ACIP.

The Maha crowd has been disseminating lots of messages trying to get most of us to, you know, ignore the lying media and buy in. Like this video posted by Maha influencer nurse Kate Johnson in March. There has been unrelenting, very fear-mongering coverage of the couple hundred cases of measles that was diagnosed over the past few weeks. And what you need to keep in mind when you see these headlines is that Big Pharma spends millions

a ton of money to have the influence over the media companies to get narratives written in a very specific way. Under the new HHS secretary, RFK Jr., they're going to be looking at repealing immunity for these companies, which is going to be a very big deal for them. So they're trying to get out in front and create a lot of fear in the population to make people scared.

And in the caption, she wrote, "'One measles death in 10 years. "'100,000 deaths from diabetes per year.'

That seems a bit of a non sequitur, but I think this touches on a lot of the big narratives right now around vaccine skepticism. What do you think about the claim that the measles outbreak has been overblown by the media? I think it's been underblown by the media. I mean, really, if you look at the CDC website today, it'll say that there are roughly 1,200 cases of measles that have occurred over the past year.

In truth, if you talk to people on the ground, people in health departments, they think that number is at least 3,000 cases and probably 5,000 cases. You know that three people have died from measles. You also know that that equals the total number of deaths from measles in this country over the last 25 years. You know that two young children, six- and eight-year-old healthy little girls in West Texas died from measles. You know that we haven't seen a measles death in a child in this country since 2003. That's more than 20 years ago. This isn't overblown at all.

What you would like to see in some ways is the story of those two children who died unnecessarily of measles. What did that feel like? We need to make this come alive. And were RFK Jr. an actual secretary of health and human services who cared about the health and well-being of children in this country, he would stand up and loudly and clearly proclaim, vaccinate your children. It is unconscionable that two healthy children just died from a vaccine-preventable disease in the United States of America.

I feel like what's happening in public health right now is kind of getting swallowed up in all the other crises on the front page. What is the risk of not really understanding or paying attention to what Kennedy's up to? I think that what will happen over time is that he will destroy vaccine programs bit by bit. It's already happening. He's like the velociraptor in Jurassic Park, sort of testing where the weaknesses in the fence are.

And for all his talk about decreasing obesity in this country, and we do need to decrease obesity in this country. We are more obese than other countries. And as a consequence, we have higher rates of hypertension, high blood pressure, higher rates of type 2 diabetes. All true. I don't hear anything about that from him. He's talking about taking red dye out of Skittles and destroying vaccine programs. That's not making us healthy.

I don't think people realize how far out there he is. If you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, what you'll find on pages 285 to 288 is he doesn't believe in the germ theory. He doesn't believe that specific germs cause specific diseases like viruses or bacteria and that therefore the treatment or prevention of those germs will matter or will be life-saving. That's who he is. It's really that crazy. So you say these maha narratives are

Thank you.

Encouraging skepticism of medical and scientific institutions. What does all this tell us about the overall state of the public perception of expertise in general?

I think it's a dangerous time. What should worry people is that someone like Fiona Havers at the CDC recently quit. Fiona Havers is a 13-year veteran at the CDC. She presented to the ACIP in April what the impact of COVID was in the United States over the past year in children.

What she found was that there were about 7,000 children hospitalized with COVID, that one in five of those children was sent to the intensive care unit, that 152 children died of COVID, that about half were previously healthy, and that virtually all were unvaccinated. Now, the impact of that presentation should have been

that the CDC once again underlined how important it was for children to get a primary vaccine. I'm not talking about yearly vaccines, a primary vaccines. And the opposite happened. RFK Jr. stood up on that one-minute video presentation on X

and said, we are no longer recommending the COVID vaccine for healthy young children, which was the opposite of what one would conclude from those data. And so she quit. And she said, I am worried about the way that data are being handled by the CDC. I am worried that American children now are at greater risk of vaccine-preventable diseases. That should worry people. Did the experts, the CDC, alienate people during the pandemic? Is that part of this?

Yes, I think it is. The experts in the public health system in general. I think what happened in 2020 when we didn't have anything and we were dealing with a virus that was killing hundreds or thousands of people a day and that could be spread asymptomatically is we shuttered schools and we closed businesses and we restricted travel and we isolated and masked and quarantined and social distanced because we didn't have vaccines until the end of the year.

I think that was seen as massive government overreach, especially the shuttering of schools, especially for children who were sort of in high risk. And then the following year, when we had a vaccine by early 2021, you couldn't go anywhere without your vaccine card. You couldn't go to your favorite bar or restaurant or sporting event or whatever.

place of worship, you could have been fired from your job. And again, that was seen as massive intrusion in my quote-unquote medical freedom. I think that we leaned into this libertarian left hook, and I think we're feeling the punch of that hook now. What do you mean we leaned into the libertarian left hook? I think there is a tension between public health

and individual rights and freedoms. Public health does consider that you have to care about your neighbor. If you're just saying, "I want to do what I want to do and the hell with my neighbor," that is an anti-public health stance. There was one moment actually in California in 2014 that sort of signified this to me. There was a measles epidemic that started in Southern California, spread to 25 states, involved a few hundred people.

And so the state senator named Richard Pan, who was a pediatrician by training actually, wanted to eliminate the philosophical exemption for vaccination in that state, a state that didn't have a religious exemption. So therefore, he would have eliminated all non-medical exemptions.

It was a fight to do that. Certainly the anti-vaccine people were up in arms. But there was a little boy, a little seven-year-old boy, who spoke at those meetings where the anti-vaccine people were out there screaming. He had to stand on a chair so he could reach the microphone. And he said, His name is Rhett Crowett. Leukemia is cancer in my blood. For three and a half years, I took chemo to get the bad guys out.

I can't be vaccinated. I depend on you to protect me. Don't I count? To me, he was the voice of society. So...

If you look at Trump's appointments across HHS, there are all these people who came to prominence as COVID skeptics. Of course, devaluing expertise seems to be part of his project, actually, if you consider his appointments across all of his agencies. But the impact seems to be especially onerous in this case. I agree. Marty McCary, who's

head of the FDA said that the government was hiding the fact that the mRNA COVID vaccines were a rare cause of myocarditis when they didn't hide that at all. I mean, I was on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee. The minute those data became available, they were disseminated widely. So I don't know what he's talking about. People have asked me the question, do I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will cause distrust in public health? I think the answer is no. I think that he was brought in because he distrusts public health.

He has disdain for the agency he's heading. He has disdain for the FDA, the NIH, National Institutes of Health, the CDC. That's why he's there. He represents our disdain for the federal government, and we will suffer this.

I guess there's an important lesson to be learned here then from COVID and how science communication could improve. Yes, I think we need to explain what we're doing and why we're doing it. I think we can't assume that people understand. And if we make a broad recommendation that involves a lot of groups, we need to make it clear why each of those groups do need to be vaccinated and include the public in that decision-making.

I think we underestimate what the public can handle. So, for example, I think very early on with the COVID vaccine, we should have obviously recommended an initial vaccine for everyone. But in terms of yearly vaccine, it made more sense to target high-risk groups, pregnant people, people who are immunocompromised, people who are elderly, people who had high-risk medical conditions.

but you didn't have to give a yearly vaccine to everyone. And I think the reason that we did that was we thought that if we target high-risk groups, which most other countries in this world did, it was a nuanced message. And a nuanced message would be seen as a garbled message. And I think we should have had more trust that the American public could understand all that.

And also we needed to make it clear that when decisions were made, they were based on what you knew at the time. Yeah, like the requirement to wear masks. It turned out that these were droplets, not aerosols that were spreading COVID, right? Right, and we should have explained that

It wasn't going to be 100% effective. We should have explained that when you got this vaccine, it was going to protect you against serious disease for a fairly long time, but it wasn't going to protect you against mild to moderate disease probably for more than six months. And moderate disease is not trivial. I mean, you could be home for a few days coughing with fever, chills, body aches.

And that's not fun. And I think people were compelled to get the vaccine, mandated to get the vaccine. Then they got the vaccine. Then six months later, a year later, got a moderate infection and thought, these people lied to me. They made me get this vaccine. I'm still sick.

You mentioned Fiona Havers, who very publicly resigned from the CDC in protest of the manipulation and suppression of data. Five CDC leaders left in March. I guess we can assume they won't be the last. So can we also assume that this brain drain will have an impact on medical research in the U.S.? That's already happened. I mean, you've seen...

the administration, the Trump administration, canceled grant after grant after grant. Certainly all grants related to how we perceive vaccines, grants related to the human immunodeficiency virus vaccine, grants related to anything mRNA related regarding vaccines or even regarding cancer. So it's been this sort of

attack on the research infrastructure. It's certainly any possible university has felt this, and it's going to take us a long time to come back from this. We will come back from this, but we have to get through this period when, frankly, there is an attack on public health in this country.

How are you feeling these days, Paul? Pretty sad. I wake up every day sad that the things that I care about, which is the health and well-being, particularly of children, because I'm a pediatrician by training, is putting kids at risk. I mean, I have two grandchildren who are, you know, two and a half and nine months old, and I feel badly for, you know, at least their immediate future in terms of being able to protect themselves from diseases that should be easy to protect against.

They could still get the vaccines. They won't be covered by insurance. So again, it falls on the shoulders of the poor. Always. Thank you so much. Thank you. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and a physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.

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