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- [00:00]
Sam Stein
Hey, everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullork, and I am joined by Jonathan Cohn, who writes our Breakdown newsletter, which everyone should be reading if you're not already subscribe to that. We are going to be talking about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. What else? But in this case, he's made a series of. Well, I don't want to call it perplexing because we all kind of predicted it, but it is still perplexing. Announcements on vaccines that if you're Senator Bill Cassidy, you really should be probably ashamed at this point. But we'll get to that later before we do subscribe to the feed. Really appreciate it, and it's helpful for us share the stuff. We're all prisoner to the algorithm. All right, Cohen, let's talk. There's been like, four or five major RFK Junior announcements. Not all of them are on vaccines, but the big ones are. And I just want to kind of go through this list and then you can give us the real rundown about how serious this is, how much it matters, and why you think he's doing it. So the biggest one is, in my estimation, that he is going to be requiring, or he says HHS is going to be requiring, placebo testing for new vaccines. This has been something that he has talked about repeatedly prior to becoming HHS secretary, thinks that these vaccines are not necessarily safe or at a minimum, not properly tested. And so there's a lot of ethical concerns about this. What do you make of it?
- [01:28]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah. So I. First of all, I. I think we can say he doesn't think they're safe. I mean, he has said that over his career, as, you know, along the way, as he has, you know, at various times needed to seem more acceptable. For example, and you were mentioning Senator Cassidy, when he needed confirmation votes, he would say things like, well, I'm not anti vax.
- [01:50]
Sam Stein
I'm just. I want to make sure they're properly tested.
- [01:53]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, Just. Just, you know, we want transparency. I just. I want to give people. And in fact, just recently, he says, like, I want people to make their own decisions based on the best information. And that's all I'm here to do. So, I mean, number one, let's. Let's be honest, I'm quite scuffed. I don't think that's. I think he's lying. All right. I think he's just spinning, at least so just to get that out there. One of his claims is that the vaccines out there have not been adequately tested, and he says that's because not every vaccine has gone through placebo testing. So the things to realize here is actually most vaccines, you know, the new vaccines do in fact go through placebo testing. You know, that's part of the.
- [02:25]
Sam Stein
What we're talking about is different iterations of existing vaccines that they are trying to bring to market.
- [02:31]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, right, right. So, you know, the latest flu vaccine, you know, a new iteration of the new COVID vaccine, a new variation on the MMR vaccine. And sometimes you don't do a placebo test on a vaccine that's been around and you got the new iteration because, number one, you can be very confident and safe. I mean, how many millions of Americans have gotten the MMR or by now, the COVID vaccine? We have a vast amount of information, and by the way, we have probably more information on adverse effects from vaccines than almost any other kind of medication. Precisely because we watch these so carefully. Every adverse event gets right. So we've really studied these super carefully. And you know, if you want to do a placebo testing, you actually then you run into some problems, some practical and philosophical problems in some of these cases. So first of all, you don't want to give a placebo test to measles, a new measles vaccine, if you don't have to, because you're giving a bunch of kids a non vaccine, they're going to get the measles, you know, and this ought to be obvious in this conversation. This ought to be the background for this conversation. But can we just remind people that people, measles is a really bad disease. People die from the measles. We don't want that to happen.
- [03:50]
Sam Stein
It's happening right now. It's happening right now in West Texas. Yes, you want to get them vaccinated. You don't want to say, hey, you might be getting vaccinated, you might not, and then have the parents have to deal with that. So real ethical, moral considerations, there's an.
- [04:02]
Jonathan Cohn
Oral when in addition to that, when you're talking about something like the flu, for example, let's say flu vaccines or Covid, which is a mutating virus, it's changing frequently, year after every year, there's a new flu virus. And it's what you got in the past, plus some new variants. And the reason they update it every year is because the flu changes every year there's a flu season. And you want to get that flu vaccine out in time so that people can get it now. It's not a perfect science. Sometimes it works better than other times. And whatever but the point is, you got to move quickly. If you're spending six months on a placebo test of the flu virus, you.
- [04:39]
Sam Stein
Might miss the season. Yes. What's the point? Right.
- [04:42]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. Thanks. You know, now it's a new flu virus out there. It's not any good anymore, and so you run into problems. It's not practical. It's not necessary. And again, I think to me, the backdrop for this is, as much as anything else, it's one more way, one more add to the list of ways he is just contributing to doubts about vaccines and making people think, oh, are these safe? Should I take them?
- [05:06]
Sam Stein
And this brings us to the second thing that he did, which was yesterday.
- [05:09]
Unnamed Speaker
Now, there are populations in our country, like the Mennonites in Texas were most afflicted, and they have religious objections to the vaccination because the MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris and. And DNA particles. So they don't want to take it. So we ought to be able to take care of those populations when they get sick.
- [05:36]
Sam Stein
All right, so there he is, and he's. And he's saying, like, look, this is. There's fetal tissue parts. And he's speaking about it as if, like, this is a weird sort of foreign, disgusting object that people shouldn't be putting into their bodies. There's two things here. One is unpacking the actual substance of this. But two is it wasn't that long ago where he was down in Texas, and he was kind of forced, in a weird way to say people should get the MMR vaccine, that it's, you know, it is useful to fighting this measles outbreak. It's clear that he didn't mean it. It's clear that it was just that his heart is in spreading skepticism and criticism of this vaccine. So that that's been obviously exposed. But talk a little bit about. I mean, you and I were talking prior to this. Are fetal tissues actually in the vaccine? Does it matter? Like, what is the actual substance? So, sorry, sorry, I have to ask. It's important.
- [06:32]
Jonathan Cohn
This. You know, it's just these are. These are not serious arguments. And I mean, let me say, as with all of them, you're going to. You'll see like a kernel. There's a kernel of seriousness here and a real issue. But it's, you know, so the deal is MMR vaccine is derived from cell lines, and if you go back and they've been, you know, know, reproduce the original cell lines for some of them, and this is true for some other vaccines. As well, were taken from aborted fetuses. I can't remember. I think one was in Denmark. I don't remember the details, but, you know, the cells reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and reproduced. And so, yeah, you know, technically speaking, there's like DNA, you know, and there's pieces, you know, that go trace all the way back to that original, you know, in the same way, you know, I mean, you know, I.
- [07:22]
Sam Stein
Sorry. He just makes it seem like there. The way he describes. It's like there's an aborted fetus and they're scraping parts off of it and putting into a vial and then giving. That's not the case.
- [07:31]
Jonathan Cohn
No, no, no. And the analogy. This is not quite a perfect analogy, but it's kind of close. I think it sort of works. Is that like, you know, if you go in the ocean, right, and you, like, swallow some water, you know, you're swallowing some pee, right? Because fish urinate. Whales.
- [07:46]
Sam Stein
That's why I go. That's why I go in the ocean.
- [07:48]
Jonathan Cohn
Okay. I mean, you know what? You know, I mean, you gotta go back on the beach, go into the bathroom, and the sand, it is kind of. You get the sand in your toes. It's a whole thing. I get it. I get it.
- [07:59]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [07:59]
Jonathan Cohn
You know, so. But, you know, it's a tiny little piece because, you know, these, you know, it breaks down. There's a little bit of molecules in there. You know, we all are breathing the air molecules that Julius Caesar breathed a bit when he was, you know, stabbed in the Roman forum. Is that where he was stabbed? I think so, yeah, something like that. So, you know, that is what he is saying. But this gets to your broader point, which is that, you know, he didn't make it sound like there were scraping pieces, which I guess some people might think is real, but, you know, it is another way to sort of convey his doubts and his skepticism. And, you know, we wrote about this and talked about this at the time, but, you know, he. There was a big deal. Like he gave the CBS interview. Like, we, you know, vaccines are the best way to prevent measles. And they got a lot of news, right? It was headlines. Oh, you know, RFK comes out for vaccines.
- [08:44]
Sam Stein
Yeah, it was a weird. It was. He had flipped. Finally. He had seen the left.
- [08:47]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah. And then you watch the interview and first of all, like, he said it in the most grudging way possible, only after being asked five times and was surrounded by misinformation. And, you know, it is very clear he is not. He does not believe this. And he's conveying that in every possible way. And you know, again, to what you were saying before, we're in the middle of a measles outbreak. Two children have died. There's no children have died of measles. And, you know, in years. And we're shaping the biggest outbreak in decades because people aren't taking the vaccine. And the highest ranking health official in the United States is out there giving people validating skepticism of a vaccine that is safe.
- [09:30]
Sam Stein
And I'm going to go through the checklist. And then, because it's not just the measles, I mean, he pushed out Peter Marks, who was the chief vaccine specialist at the fda. What was he. He held up the approval for the Novax COVID vaccine. He paused working on a new COVID vaccine and pill form. So it's across the board now. That brings us to today, and this just hit the inbox this morning. There's this $500 million new initiative that he announced with the NIH to develop a universal vaccine. But I didn't quite understand the specifics of. I know you've been asking around, what is the actual details here?
- [10:10]
Jonathan Cohn
So there's sort of two pieces to it. So there has been this idea kicking around for a long time of a universal vaccine. You get like, it can, it can, it can it can one shot to cure it all. Not all, but, you know, a lot of different variants. And, you know, it's something in theory, if you could do it, sure, that would be great. You know, there's a lot of ideas we're out there pursuing. There is, you know, separately but connected. You know, there has been interest at various points in vaccines that use what are called whole proteins, whole virus vaccine, which is basically the vaccines, like the MRNA vaccines we get now. A lot of the, most of the vaccines we get now, they use like a piece of a pathogen and then that's like tricks, you know, that basically keys off your immune response. You know, the theory of a whole germ vaccine is that it could be more effective, it could last longer, maybe, maybe not. It's all very theoretical. You know, it's not that particular idea, as far as I know. And I'll be honest, this is not something I spend a lot of time on because it hasn't gotten a lot of attention, at least in my, you know, in the circles that I pay attention to. I don't think it's thought to be like one of the great hopes for the future of, you know, there was a big national academy's report on, you know, next generation vaccines that looked at a lot of different areas. And this was. I don't think, I don't, I want to, I would like to go back and double check because I don't think they talked about whole virus vaccines anyway. So here, you know, they're announcing now this sort of $500 million investment in these kinds of vaccines, which happen to be something that are promoted by one of the new HHS officials just appointed. And I assume that's where this came from, or partly at least, you know, $500 million. It's a lot of money for an effort like this, especially at a time when they're cutting so much that they say, well, we can't afford this. You know, they're cutting, you know, we've cut out injury prevention as CDC and you know, we're cutting disease doctors or I guess they brought those.
- [12:10]
Sam Stein
So I do it.
- [12:12]
Jonathan Cohn
So, so here's the thing. When you're trying to analyze this is true Trump administration wide. But I think especially here, the hard, the tricky part is like, you can never assume there's like a coherent plan, per se.
- [12:24]
Sam Stein
Yeah. This is what I'm getting at. Like, what is the actual thinking here?
- [12:28]
Jonathan Cohn
Like in the past, when the government does things, it moves slowly, which can be frustrating. That means they explain everything every step along where, you know, we're getting tweets, we're getting announcements, you know, so it. My guess, I don't know. I'm piecing this together. A plausible theory that fits the facts here is that there's a few things going on. You know, they are, on the one hand, Kenny's doing all this stuff and it's. But it's getting some bad publicities. They want to look like they're, they're doing something on vaccines.
- [12:54]
Sam Stein
Right.
- [12:56]
Jonathan Cohn
They have this guy at H. @ FDA now who. Or I think it's FDA, maybe it's HHS. I have to go back and check that. Who has been a proponent of the sort of whole, you know, whatever. It's like anything in science. You find people who, you know, everyone, you know. And it's not like a crazy, crazy thing.
- [13:12]
Sam Stein
It sounds like it's. Yeah, you want to look into it, maybe even invest some serious money into it.
- [13:17]
Jonathan Cohn
But 500 million is not much. But I think the overlap here, I think the missing link here is that so much of what so much of Kennedy's thinking and the sort of anti vax thinking is tied up with pharma is bad and MRNA is bad. And so here the theory is that they're not just going to sort of develop this kind of mechanism.
- [13:44]
Sam Stein
They also have a lot of skepticism over the number of shots that are administered.
- [13:47]
Jonathan Cohn
Yes.
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Sam Stein
And if you can put it into one large dose.
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Jonathan Cohn
This is one large dose. It's not mRNA. And by the way, part of this is not just to have to develop a. To actually, you know, produce this thing inside the government itself. So you're not doing it with pharma, which, you know. Can we just pause and say, I thought these were, like, the small government conservatives.
- [14:11]
Sam Stein
No, they want to horseshoe politics, man. That's all. It's all connecting into here. Good health with the good healthy eating by the government for the government, from the government. All right, so let's. Let's just close here, quickly, the big picture takeaway from Kennedy over the past couple months, starting with just sort of the confirmation, how he's handled the measles outbreak, and then these pronouncements that we've seen in succession in the past two weeks. What's your takeaway?
- [14:38]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I mean, my takeaway is exactly what the critics feared, what Senator Cassidy told us we were not getting, which is he's using the platform in various ways to undermine our sort of programs, to promote vaccines, to research vaccines, to develop vaccines. And this is in the context of a broader reorientation of. Of. Of hhs, you know, away from, you know, this is a slight exaggeration, but not that slight. Away from science, I mean, at a way, you know, and more towards things he cares about, some of which are fine, some of which might be good. You know, I'm all for getting the food dyes. You know, I don't care if my Fruit Loops are kind of a dimmer shade of purple.
- [15:21]
Sam Stein
No, I want. I want the. I want the pure red Fruit Loop.
- [15:24]
Jonathan Cohn
Okay, you know what? I'll be honest. I. I like them that color, too. You know, if they're bad, take them out. That's fine. But, like, I like the bright colors. I actually, Fruit Loops are one of my favorite airplane snacks, actually.
- [15:36]
Sam Stein
So there you go. But back to. Back to the point. It's. It is. It is about as bad as you could have thought.
- [15:42]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
- [15:44]
Sam Stein
All right, well, that will. Senator Cassie will have to live with that. One cone. Thanks, man. I appreciate this. Everyone should be subscribed or reading. I should say your newsletter. It's essential. And we'll obviously be covering a lot more of RFK Jr. As these things progress. Thank you for tuning in. Thanks, buddy. Really appreciate it. Subscribe to the feed. Talk later.