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- [00:02]
A
It's a huge indictment on the U.S. public health system and the U.S. public health communication system of how we've just said these vaccines are optional. They're a a la carte. Choose your own adventure example of whatever you can do for your health.
- [00:18]
B
Coming up on more to the story, I talk with epidemiologist Jessica Melody Rivera about what she and other experts say is the dismantling of American health policy under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stay with us.
- [00:39]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [01:07]
B
This is more to the story. I'm Al Edson. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Was appointed Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, some government officials praised him as an advocate for the people and cited his commitment to transparency. But most of the scientific community were shocked and concerned. RFK Jr. Was already outspoken in the anti vaccination movement and his quote, make America healthy again initiatives seem to align with President Trump's agenda to drastically change health policy. From a newly proposed vaccine schedule to an upside down food pyramid. RFK Jr. Is bringing major changes to health services and recommendations to help us figure out exactly what's going on. I brought back friend of the show Jessica Melotti Rivera, who is an infectious disease expert and science communicator, Jessica Melody Rivera. Jessica, how are you?
- [02:05]
A
I'm doing okay, Al. Better seeing you.
- [02:08]
B
Yes. I mean every time we get together we talk about depressing things. I'm sorry, we do.
- [02:13]
A
I know. I always feel terrible.
- [02:16]
B
We'll start off with the head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So he fired government vaccine advisors. Who did he replace them with?
- [02:29]
A
He replaced them with his friends. His friends who all have the same worldview, very strong held bias against vaccines to be on a very, very consequential committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to pour over all of the clinical data related to vaccines so they can provide evidence based recommendations on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. It informs all of the recommend they got rid of all the experts and replaced them with people who have been long standing contrarians to vaccine science.
- [03:07]
B
So tell me, who is Kurt Milhone the new chair of the advisory committee?
- [03:13]
A
He is among one of the most anti vaccine advocates that there is. He has spent a long, long time questioning the utility, the usefulness of Vaccines. The irony though is not lost on me that I think he's a pediatric cardiologist, so it's hard for me to understand how he can reconcile being a provider for the population we're trying to protect the most. But he is one of the very loud Maha advocates and it was no surprise to many of us that he was tapped for this position.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah, we should talk a little bit about Maha because I think you know Maha meaning make America healthy again. And to be clear, I am not tuned into this the way you are, which is why you're on the show. But whenever I hear about Maha, I hear like these two different sides, right? You've got one side that feels very anti science and then you've got another side that are saying like some common sense things. For example, they're talking about going out and exercising and all of that stuff. So from your point of view as a science communicator, how do you look at the Maha movement?
- [04:28]
A
Yeah. In the most succinct answer, Maha is asking the right question, how do we make America healthy again? But they've come to the table with answers already to that question that are not rooted in evidence. Right. And that's the concerning part. Science is a very iterative process. It's about asking questions and getting evidence to answer those questions. It's not even about certainty on either side. But Maha came in hot with an agenda with a bunch of alternative and contrarian views on long standing science. And let me be very clear, this is not saying science should never be questioned. Science is always being questioned. But when you come in with answers to questions and hypotheses already, that's the backwards way to do science. Right? And when you come in and say we're going to look for the answers of why autism incidence is this and say we figured it out, it's this with no time in between. That's a big red flag that it's not a very genuine or scientific process to make America healthy again.
- [05:37]
B
It feels like they are willing to conduct a science experiment with the American public and people could really get sick and die from this experiment.
- [05:49]
A
100%. And I say this as a mom, it troubles me that we have. What I see from a lot of the Maha advocates and what I see from a lot of the people in power in this administration is this comfortability with pediatric morbidity and mortality. You know, Robert Malone, who is a famously known, infamously known anti vaccine contrarian, said that 250 pediatric deaths from influenza was a, quote, modest number. Unbelievable. It ended up being 290 after all the data was totaled from last year's flu season. I remember sharing on online that before the MMR vaccine we would see children dying of measles every single year. And people would say, that's not that many. And it just bewilders me to see this, you know, very lackadaisical attitude to kids being, you know, what they said is the cost of doing business for the prioritization of personal freedom and autonomy.
- [06:52]
B
It feels like, well, two things I think may be happening there. One is that numbers don't have a face and name. And so like, it's easy to throw out those numbers and be like, oh, that's an acceptable loss. But those are, those are people, those are families who have lost their children. And then I think on the other side, certain segments of this country are going through their own little epidemic, which is the loss of empathy. And they don't really see outside of their circle. So if, you know, as long as their circle is protected, it's fine, it's fine.
- [07:29]
A
But you know, it's so interesting, Alan, I don't know if you're on this side of the Internet. I unfortunately am. There's even a war on empathy itself. There's a whole movement on the right to say that empathy is toxic, to say that empathy clouds the mind from good judgment, that empathy allows for us to approve of problematic policies. And it's just, it to me seems like humans have actually just lost the plot entirely, that we've forgotten the fact that no person can live completely focused on themselves in an isolationist, individualistic sense. We are so beholden to the, the well being of our communities to thrive as a species. And I just can't believe that we're having these conversations of should we care about our neighbors?
- [08:16]
B
Yeah, yeah. Do we currently have. Because I've seen this somewhere and I just, you know, you're my science communicator. You're my personal science communicator. So I've seen somewhere that there are outbreaks of measles happening across the country and that, and in one part of the country is a pretty serious outbreak
- [08:39]
A
in South Carolina right now. The outbreak is getting out of control. We had a terrible outbreak in Texas in 2025. It spread over to a few other states and right now the epicenter seems to be in South Carolina. And honestly, we are likely weeks away from losing our measles elimination status as a country. And what that means is for 20 years this disease was eliminated, meaning there wasn't kind of persistent spread of the disease. There were momentary outbreaks. They would often happen with 2Dynam a drop in vaccination rates and usually an imported case from outside. And instead we're seeing persistent transmission happening here and Canada just lost their elimination status. And we are very much responsible for the spillover of that outbreak from the US To Canada. And so it's a huge indictment on the U.S. public health system and the U.S. public health communication system of how we've just said these vaccines are optional. They're a a la carte. Choose your own adventure example of whatever you can do for your health. And unfortunately, that's just very much not the case with the most contagious infectious disease that we know of, which is measles.
- [09:52]
B
Yeah. Recently I saw Dr. Oz on a news program and he was telling people to get the vaccine when they brought it up to him that he was basically in opposition to what Arif gave. K Jr was saying, yeah. His response was that that's not what RFK Jr. Said. But that is what he said. Correct.
- [10:15]
A
This is the thing about RFK Jr. He is as Teflon as it gets. And he is. I wish he was not smart. He is incredibly smart. He is incredibly strategic with his words and with his agenda that he can word salad his way through congressional testimonies and through talking points in a situation where he doesn't say exactly verbatim what he is actually implying. For years he has implied and said that there's no safe vaccine. For years he has implied and said that you can treat measles with things like cod liver oil, vitamin A or good diet. And it's shocking to me that he can continue to speak out of both sides of his mouth and get away with it as HHS secretary because he's not out screaming, don't get that vaccine. He keeps saying, we're not taking away your vaccines. You can still get it if you want. We're not banning them. We're not saying that we don't need them.
- [11:18]
B
The new chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Kurt Milhone, was talking about the polio vaccine and he questioned if Americans still need to receive it. What do you think about that?
- [11:32]
A
So this is probably one of the most heinous things I've seen and heard. And I've often joked that amnesia is going to kill us all because we're treating diseases like polio, diseases of the past as out of sight, out of mind. The reason why we are not seeing polio is because we vaccinate against polio. The reason why we're not seeing a generation of kids being disfigured, paralyzed or killed by polio or in iron lungs because of polio is because we vaccinate. And yet we look at this as well. If I don't see it, then why are we vaccinating again? And we've got good water sanitation, so the transmission is not going to be as high. It's just such a complete misunderstanding of public health and why we do things to prevent harm in the future. And when he argued that it was more important to have our personal freedom than to require vaccines for one of the most cruel and painful diseases that humans have known is unbelievable to me. We in the global health community often say we're this close and we gesture with our fingers like about an inch. We're this close to actually eradicating polio. There's only ever been one disease eradicated in the human population. It was smallpox. And that's because a disease can only be eradicated if it affects humans only. The next disease on that list is polio. We can actually eradicate it. That's more than eliminate it and just wipe it off of the face of the earth. And here we are re litigating the value of one of the most incredible innovations in public health that has added to our longevity because personal freedom is more important.
- [13:17]
B
Coming up on more to the story. What's going on with the cdc?
- [13:22]
A
Oof. How long do we have?
- [13:26]
B
More with Science Communicator Jessica Melody Rivera in a moment, but first, here's your reminder that there is a really easy way you can keep up with all the important work we're doing here at Reveal. You can sign up for our free newsletter. Just go to revealnews.org newsletter to receive your weekly email reminding you about all of our good reporting. We have to stay connected now more than ever. Okay, hang tight. More on the state of public health in just a moment. This is more to the story. I'm Al Edson and we're back with Science communicator and friend of the show, Jessica Melody Rivera. I'd like to remind the audience a little bit about something that we talked about before RFK Jr was selected, which is the fact that RFK Jr has made a lot of money by pushing the anti vaccination ideas. Can you talk me through that?
- [14:37]
A
Yeah. RFK Jr. Has made millions off of his anti vaccine movement. He was, prior to being HHS secretary, the head of a nonprofit organization which he started called the Children's Health defense. You can think about CHD as the ambulance chasers of vaccines in which they made tons of money with lawsuits and would profit from them greatly. Not to mention the fact that he became the sweetheart of the movement. So his speaking gigs, his public appearances, and even Al, if you can imagine the swag that they sell on the Internet, which is wild, like onesies that would say like unvaccinated or toxin free or whatever they were saying about their kids. But when we say that this man has quite literally grifted his way to this position, he has, and he's been doing it for a very long time. I mean, RFK Jr. Has been on our radar for decades. He pivoted from being a climate activist to an anti vaccine activist when moms who were very concerned about vaccine safety and had come up with the conclusion that vaccines cause autism needed a champion. And he stepped into that role and has been at the head of that movement ever since.
- [15:59]
B
RFK's food pyramid, why has it flipped? What does it mean? How do you feel about it?
- [16:07]
A
All of that, let's be very real, it's a triangle. It's not a pyramid anymore and it's upside down. And it is frustrating because they've been screaming for years and years about conflicts of interest. And if you look at who was behind this, it's exactly who you can see on the top of that pyramid. It's big beef, it's big dairy, it's big protein, big fat. You know, it's all those interest groups and those corporations that have been trying to push this type of narrative about what good real food means. I mean, they had some of the best brains working on the dietary guidelines for years and it takes years to do this work. And, and for a long time they had proposed looking at this with the lens of equity in mind because we don't live in a homogenous population. We have different ethnicities, different access, you know, situations for food. People live in food deserts, people have different food tolerabilities and intolerances. People have restrictions based on beliefs and religious limitations on what they can eat. And so the previous dietary guidelines considered that, considered what do indigenous people eat? What do they have access to, what is within their dietary restrictions and other ethnic groups and other religious groups. And that was tossed simply because of that, simply because there was an equity lens to the previous dietary guidelines. And instead they wanted to think about this in a well, how can we justify this war on ultra processed foods, this war on seed oils, this war on food dyes, all the all the air quote, boogeymen that they had identified, which again, were all distractions from the actual issue, which is food is too expensive and too unequally distributed in this country. And so when you were telling people to eat, quote, real food while cutting SNAP benefits, you are literally talking out of both sides of your mouth. And nothing in that dietary food guideline made decisions for people who don't have access to good real food, quote, any easier or any more accessible.
- [18:36]
B
I'm curious, do we have any data about the different communities across the country that have made basically scientific decisions that kind of come from the Maha frame of mind?
- [18:52]
A
It's a little too soon to tell. Right. And this is the problem, is that the decisions that are happening today, that are happening with such brute force, everything from taking fluoride out of water, reconfiguring the pediatric vaccine schedule, the consequences are going to be belated. And that's what's scary, I think, specifically, even about the recommendation of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, right? We know that if an infant is exposed to hepatitis B at birth, they have a 90% chance of having chronic liver infection, which can lead to cirrhosis and can lead to cancer and death. And we won't know of that consequence until those kids are much older, right? Until it becomes a chronic condition. But we've done the data to prove the inverse of that, which is the earliest intervention at birth, Day one is how you can prevent that chronic infection which has no treatment. And so it's worrisome that this movement today is going to appear like everything's fine. Look, people aren't dropping dead. They're not dropping dead. Yet.
- [19:55]
B
Just for our listeners to know, RFK's vaccine panel has dropped the universal recommendation that children should get vaccinated for hepatitis B at birth. So you're saying that, like, not doing that, we're going to see the effects of that years from now.
- [20:10]
A
Years.
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B
When those kids grow up.
- [20:12]
A
When those kids grow up and they have chronic hepatitis, which is a incurable condition and can cause cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and death.
- [20:22]
B
Yeah. What's going on with the cdc?
- [20:25]
A
Oof. How long do we have? I mean, the thing that is. I feel like I said the sentence 100 times already. But what's so sad is that for years we said the CDC is the premier public health agency in the world, even with its flaws. And, you know, you and I talked a lot during COVID 19, during the pandemic, that it was a very fallible entity, because humans are fallible. Their recommendations were not always evidence based because they too had to comply with corporate pressure. I remember specifically when the CDC acquiesced to the demands of airline corporations and other big corporations who were saying, listen, we can't have people out sick this long. You gotta shorten the isolation and quarantine requirements. That was not an evidence based decision. But I still felt like I could provide that feedback, provide that criticism and still believe those are excellent, highly trained, altruistic scientists behind those doors in Atlanta, doing the best that they can with what they had, knowing that it's a government institution that is going to be fallible. I can't say that anymore. I mean, I can say that about the individuals that I know that are still there. But as an entity, I am not sending people to cdc.gov anymore. And I know plenty of public health groups and public health communicators who are creating alternative resource lists to tell people where to get their information because the website and that group has been compromised.
- [21:51]
B
The US has withdrawn from the World Health Organization. What does that mean for the sharing and learning of medical information and how does that impact the average American's life?
- [22:04]
A
Yeah, regardless of whether people believe it or not, global health security is a national health security issue. And COVID 19, again, was another example of how a disease far away can be on US soil in one day. One person on one flight. And so we exist in a community of global countries that are trying to share information to protect each other because diseases know no borders. And for years that looked like the sharing of data. Everything from when we hear about flu happening in the Southern Hemisphere, when the Southern hemisphere, places like Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, share their data, it helps us inform how we create our flu vaccines to better match the circulating strain. When we don't share that data, we are creating darkness here in our ability to see in the future about what potential health hazards are coming our way. And data sharing is probably one of the most powerful tools to support public health and to support public health knowledge and prevention and harm reduction. And we just walked away from that because of a very, very bizarre, an unsubstantiated claim that the WHO is some part of some, like, totalitarian, one world government idea. And anything that says multilateral is somehow a bad word for this administration.
- [23:30]
B
Across the country, states are coming together in alliances to kind of push back against this. Can we talk a little bit about that? Like what's actually happening?
- [23:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, they're very preliminary. We've got the West Coast Health alliance, and then there's an east coast one too. It's a group of states that have kind of pushed back and said, no, we're going to invest in public health. We're going to invest in data sharing and data infrastructure. We're going to create evidence based guidance that is going to follow science and not opinion. It's an effort. Right. It hasn't shown to be like, I mean, we haven't seen a lot come out of it yet, but we probably will because I think that this sledgehammering of public health infrastructure, public health recommendations is just beginning. And unfortunately we still have two and a half more years of this to look forward to.
- [24:24]
B
So this is the nightmare, scary scenario. But how prepared are we if we get hit with another pandemic?
- [24:37]
A
We are not prepared, Al, at all. I mean, hindsight is 20 20. But when I tell you that what we're seeing right now is a very angry vitriolic revenge tour looking for enemies to punish for how disruptive COVID 19 was, it has blinded people from even seeing that. The reality is pandemics are increasing in incidence that now is conspiratorial because people are looking back at the last pandemic and saying maybe that was all fake, maybe that was all planned. People who are pushing the lab leak theory are more hot and angry than ever. People who are pushing the, you know, Dr. Fauci was the conspirer of the whole thing, are louder than ever and platformed and employed even in the U.S. government. And so I worry that when the next one happens, there's going to be a level of cognitive dissonance that will not even believe it's even happening.
- [25:41]
B
Yeah. So Jessica, what's next for you and the work that you're doing?
- [25:47]
A
So I am going to continue doing what I'm doing because I think that we have never needed more sense making than ever. Making the science make sense, Making the information about the science make sense has been my North Star for many, many years. But now I feel especially compelled to make that skill, that discernment, that literacy, a very, very universal tool. And I'm thinking about this too, again with my mom hat on, because I need my kids to be good interpreters of information. They're getting bombarded with all kinds of stuff too. And if we are not good interpreters and sharers of information, that's how democracies fall, Al. I mean, truly, we are at the risk of having propaganda, misinformation, disinformation destabilize this country and countries around us.
- [26:43]
B
Jessica Melati Rivera My favorite Science Communicator. Thank you so much for coming onto the show again.
- [26:50]
A
Anytime, Elle. Thanks for having me.
- [26:55]
B
That was Science Communicator Jessica Mulatti Rivera. If you liked this episode, be sure to check out our other episode, why Trump Deemed Basic Sanitation Illegal dei. It's about how one activist's fight to keep communities healthy with clean water and proper sanitation was met with resistance. Lastly, a reminder that we are listener supported. That means listeners are like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org gift again, that's revealnews.org gift and thank you. Today's show was produced by members of the Justice Society, Josh sanburn and Carl McGurk. Allison Taki Telenides edited the show theme music and engineering helped by Fernando my man yo Arruda and Jay Breezy. Mr. Jim Briggs, I'm outletson and you know do this again next week. This is more to the story. From prx.