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- [00:01]
Sean Rameswaram
Let's talk about some of the things that Robert fluoride Kennedy Jr. Has done as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mass layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- [00:14]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at CDC.
- [00:19]
Sean Rameswaram
He canceled $500 million in federal funding for MRNA vaccine development.
- [00:25]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges with inflammation you can from their faces.
- [00:34]
Sean Rameswaram
And he might be getting petrochemicals out of your food.
- [00:37]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
40% of the food industry in this country has taken the pledge to remove food to others from all of their foods.
- [00:43]
Sean Rameswaram
You've probably heard about all those things. But on Today Explained from Vox, we're gonna talk about one thing you maybe haven't heard of. It's something he didn't do. A report he didn't publish. A report he buried.
- [01:00]
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- [01:26]
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- [02:04]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Today.
- [02:04]
Sean Rameswaram
Explain Sean Ramosur. I'm here with Dylan Scott, my colleague who's a senior correspondent at Vox covering healthcare. Dylan, you just published a piece on how the Trump administration has buried a new study on alcohol and its links to cancer. Tell us a story.
- [02:21]
Dylan Scott
This story happens in three parts. There's a study that gets commissioned. There's a fierce lobbying campaign against that study. And then there is the ultimate decision not to publish the study in its final form. So let's go back to the first part. Back in 2022, the Biden administration decided they wanted to commission a special report on alcohol and its health consequen. There's been a lot of conversation for years now about whether any amount of drinking is safe or good. For you and the Biden administration is like, we should just really dive into this. And we'll produce a report that will serve two purposes. It will be submitted to Congress as part of a report that goes to Congress every year about underage drinking. And then it'll be submitted to the health department and the USDA to be considered for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines. That gets started. And almost immediately, there's a pretty big backlash from the alcohol industry and their allies in Congress. A public relation campaign gets underway on Capitol Hill especially. You've got the alcohol industry circulating documents about the co authors of this health report saying, like, they're biased, they're secret prohibitionists, and they find a pretty receptive audience in Congress.
- [03:49]
Ezekiel Emanuel
What is it with liberals that want to control every damn aspect of your life?
- [03:53]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I'm proud to represent the Commonwealth of.
- [03:56]
Sean Rameswaram
Kentucky, home to the $9 billion Kentucky Bourbon Distillery industry.
- [04:02]
SelectQuote Advertiser
Wine has played a positive role in society and culture for 8,000 years.
- [04:10]
Ezekiel Emanuel
They want us to drink two beers a week. Frankly, they can kiss my ass.
- [04:13]
Dylan Scott
And Congress actually goes so far as commission a second study from the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering. You know, they even subpoena the administration to try to get more information about the process that led to the study being commissioned. It's just a general cloud of like, there's something wrong with this alcohol intake and health study that the Biden administration commissioned in 2022. Then on January 15, 2025, we finally see a draft version of the report, which is basically the usual RO for reports like this. Authors put together a draft, they post it for the public to see. People can comment, they can critique it, and then the authors take all that feedback and produce a final version of the report. And so this kind of brings us to the third part of the story, the suppression of the report. So they published it for public comment in January. They work on their revisions, and In March of 2025, the authors submit the final version of their report, which to the Trump administration. And after that, nothing happens. We never see the report. It is never published in its final form. And the co authors for a long time just have no idea what's going on. It's radio silence from the administration until last month. And then last month they were told the administration does not have any intention of publishing a final version of this report. They're not going to include it in the congressional report on underage drinking for. For which it was always originally supposed to be for, and they're just not gonna publish it at all. After we reported on this information, the Trump administration told us that the report had been shared with HHS and the USDA to be considered for the dietary guidelines. And so that's where we're at, where it's like this report that has been worked on for years by some of the leading alcohol health researchers in the world that was funded by taxpayer dollars. The final version of it is never gonna be released by the federal government.
- [06:22]
Sean Rameswaram
Okay, so we have a lot to clarify here, maybe starting with the fact that there are two reports, one initiated by the Biden administration and one initiated by Congress.
- [06:33]
Dylan Scott
We do have these kind of dueling reports. We've got the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, which is what the Biden administration commissioned in 2022. And we've got the National Academies report, which is what Congress approved in late 2022. And so, I mean, they have some methodolog, but what's really striking is how different their findings are.
- [06:53]
Ezekiel Emanuel
We're turn now to a new report that finds even moderate alcohol drinking. Why are you looking at me like that, Robin? Even moderate alcohol drinking can have an adverse impact on your health. But they also found that drinking a moderate amount of alcohol actually lowers your risk of dying. So there's like a not dying benefit compared to not drinking at all.
- [07:13]
Sean Rameswaram
Huh?
- [07:14]
Dylan Scott
So the Alcohol Intake and health report showed that at one drink per day for a man. So if you just have one glass of beer, beer at the end of the day, you have about a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying in your lifetime from an alcohol related cause, which is like 1 in 1000. Maybe I'll take my chances. But if you increase that to two drinks per day, and I think it's worth emphasizing that that is the currently recommended limit under the dietary guidelines that currently exist, your chances of dying from an alcohol related cause increase to 1 in 25. So that's a pretty dramatic difference and a pretty dramatic increase in your health risk even within the currently recommended limits on alcohol consumption. On the other hand, we've got this National Academy's report which came to very different conclusions. It actually reported that maybe some moderate drinking could have some modest health benefits, could actually be maybe good for your cardiovascular system. And they actually found that the association with cancer is pretty. So these are two very different stories about what alcohol does to your body and the risks that it poses. And one of them, the National Academy's report has, was published on time, no questions asked. But the first report is never going to be published in its final form.
- [08:39]
Sean Rameswaram
Trump famously doesn't drink.
- [08:42]
Ezekiel Emanuel
I can honestly say I never had.
- [08:43]
Dylan Scott
A beer in my life.
- [08:44]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Okay.
- [08:45]
Sean Rameswaram
RFK is a famously recovering addict.
- [08:49]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I became a heroin addict when I.
- [08:51]
Sean Rameswaram
Was 15. Who is obsessed with toxins and the corrupting influence of powerful lobbies. Why would these two guys, if they indeed did, conspire to bury this report? Conspire to bury this report?
- [09:09]
Dylan Scott
It's a good question, and I have tussled with that question quite a lot. And really, since the Make America Healthy Again movement, you know, kind of came into being, you know, alongside RFK's presidential campaign last year, alcohol has always been kind of a weird issue for them. It's not something that, like, the MAHA groups are super outspoken about. It is not, despite Kennedy himself, as you say, being in recovery, something that he talks about very much. And, I mean, we can only kind of guess about what their motives might be. But I do think it's worth, you know, when you remember that there is a very powerful industry with a lot of money at its disposal that has a lot of pull in Congress. You know, some of the members of Congress who've been most outspoken about this are people representing districts in Kentucky where, you know, bourbon and whiskey is a popular cultural export. Lawmakers from Napa Valley in California, with all of its wineries. According to Reuters, the alcohol industry has.
- [10:11]
Claire White
Spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress.
- [10:13]
Dylan Scott
And now the US Government is expected to revise its guidelines as early as this month, moving away from recommending that.
- [10:20]
Claire White
Consumers limit their alcohol intake.
- [10:22]
SelectQuote Advertiser
And any new label would require approval from Congress, which could be an uphill battle. The beverage industry spends tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying Congress, Mary.
- [10:32]
Dylan Scott
So this may just be like a bear that Trump and RFK Jr just didn't want to poke.
- [10:40]
Sean Rameswaram
I don't get that, Dylan. Like, this administration picks so many fights, and the public, I think, is generally aware that drinking is unhealthy. I mean, back in 2023, we covered a similar study that had a very different outcome in Canada, where the Canadian government, after seeing a study that linked alcohol to cancer, told Canadians that any amount of drinking is unhealthy. Like, this is in the water. Why not just let the people have the study that they paid for?
- [11:10]
Dylan Scott
So here's the other thing that I think the even more meta context that I think is important here, which is Covid and the pandemic and the general just war that is currently underway right now between RFK Jr. Maha, the Trump administration in General Maga as an entire political movement, and the public health establishment, people whom the first group blames for the mistakes of the pandemic and vice versa. Like these two sides are still hashing it out. They hate each other. I mean, we've seen for the past few weeks the turmoil at the CDC between their new political leadership and the longtime staffers who are more part of that old public health consensus. Why am I gonna team up with these public health experts who are dragging me about vaccines and the mistakes I made during the pandemic and all kinds of other things to help them get their message out about alcohol?
- [12:09]
Sean Rameswaram
And that's what links this alcohol story that you wrote about for VOX to the greater phenomena that is RFK Maha and public health in America right now.
- [12:23]
Dylan Scott
Yes. I think what's also telling is this is just another example of Maha and the Trump administration's actual policies and actions not lining up. You know, I wrote another story a couple of weeks ago about how, like, even though Maha is outraged about things like pesticides, the EPA is over here deregulating them and doing all, you know, deregulating microplastics and pfas. You know, these other things that Maha is worried about.
- [12:55]
Ezekiel Emanuel
It.
- [12:55]
Dylan Scott
It just, this is, I think, another example. This alcohol study is another example of how when corpor corporate interests and public health interests seem to be at odds, at least within the Trump administration, it seems like corporate interests tend to win out at least a lot of the time. And I think that is what we have seen with the administration's decision not to publish this alcohol health report.
- [13:19]
Sean Rameswaram
Dylan Scott, if you want to read his scoop about this buried alcohol report, you can find it@vox.com if you want to hear more about the links between alcohol and cancer. Dylan also appeared on the Unexplainable program this week to talk about that. When we are back on TODAY Explained, we're going to ask a guy who's worked in and around Public Health for decades what he makes of the job RFK has been doing so far as the head of health and human services here in the United States.
- [13:53]
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- [15:01]
Sean Rameswaram
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- [15:20]
Claire White
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- [15:42]
Sean Rameswaram
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- [16:31]
Claire White
After a summer of wearing sandals for months, it does feel like sock weather again. And so I'm excited to, you know, start wearing regular non sandal shoes again. Boots, sneakers, flats, loafers, and I think interestingly like I have a Bombas style of sock that could Pair with each of those types of footwear.
- [16:53]
Sean Rameswaram
Bombas also wants you know about their mission, which is that for every item you purchase, they donate one to someone facing homelessness. They say over 150 million items have been donated thanks to customers. Plus, Bombas is available for international shopping to over two hundo countries. You can go to bombas.com explain and use the code explain for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M b-s.com explained code explained at checkout. Ezekiel Emmanuel is an oncologist and a medical ethicist who works at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked on public health for the Obama administration.
- [17:40]
Ezekiel Emanuel
One of the things I'm most proud of is that we did the food plate. We pushed a lot of nutrition work and revisions. I worked on global health and trying to emphasize investments in public health infrastructure overseas.
- [17:56]
Sean Rameswaram
But he also worked with the Trump.
- [17:58]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Administration in 2016, 2017. I did some work with him. I tried to actually get him to really focus on prescription drug prices because I thought that was something he was passionate about and might do something about. Early in Covid, I worked with him for about two months trying to get the COVID response up and running.
- [18:18]
Sean Rameswaram
When it comes to the country's health, he's all for bipartisanship.
- [18:22]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Working for whoever's president, as long as they're doing good by the country, is really important.
- [18:28]
Sean Rameswaram
But with that said, he thinks Robert F. Kennedy is a disaster.
- [18:33]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Yeah, I do not think he's qualified in any shape or form. He has been against vaccines, and that is very bad. Probably the single biggest benefit to people in the 20th century in terms of total lives saved from 1974 to today. Those are huge achievements, and now we're trying to roll them back. The thing about Kennedy that I actually supported is his emphasis on nutrition, his emphasis on chronic diseases and trying to address them. The problem is, so far, I mean, the big success we've gotten is dyes.
- [19:15]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We're gonna get rid of the dyes, and one by one, we're gonna get rid of every ingredient and additive in school in food that we can legally address.
- [19:26]
Ezekiel Emanuel
That's not gonna really save any lives. Addressing the whole food chain and nutrition subsidies that we have in this country, those haven't been addressed. And those are the. You really want to address chronic disease in America? That is a critical step. And yet I don't see him really leaning into it. And yes, it's a challenge, but it's really important.
- [19:54]
Sean Rameswaram
I'm glad you brought up chronic disease in America last week at a Senate hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Defended all of his shakeups at the CDC by saying, we are the sickest.
- [20:04]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at the cdc. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy.
- [20:14]
Sean Rameswaram
Are we the sickest country in the world? I don't think we are.
- [20:17]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Well, I wouldn't say the sickest country in the world, but in terms of high income countries, we aren't doing that well. And we've fallen off the growth curve, as they say, in terms of increase in life expectancy, decrease in the number of disability adjusted life years, health span actually getting shorter. And that's been happening since roughly 1980. And there are lots of hypotheses about that. I'll give you two that I think really are important. You have to remember, and most people won't, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts, nobody ever became Secretary of Agriculture to win a popularity contest. Butts really leaned into the production of industrial commodity crops with heavy subsidies for corn, soybean, rice, wheat. That again made the components of ultra processed foods cheap. And it cut down, by the way, in small family farms. Really promoted big industrial farms. And he often said, you know, get big or get out of farming. So that was one element. The other element really timed with Ronald Reagan taking over was a cutback in the social safety net. Housing, food stamps and other social safety net programs. Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer.
- [21:50]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Of the human spirit.
- [21:51]
Ezekiel Emanuel
That combination, spending more to get cheaper components for ultra processed foods and reducing the social safety net, I think are probably two of the biggest components in terms of the obesity epidemic we've had that have really fueled chronic diseases. You see this in the increase in diabetes, increase in lots of illnesses. I think if we really want to get a health care system, we have to focus on those two elements.
- [22:24]
Sean Rameswaram
I mean, Robert F. Kennedy is trying to focus on the cdc. Specifically. He thinks they've fallen gravely short. Do you think there's lots of areas of improvement at the cdc?
- [22:34]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Yes, I do think we can improve the cdc. But let's be honest, if you're going to improve the cdc, the first place to start is not cutting its workforce, cutting its budget by billions of dollars, eliminating programs like the national center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the National center for Environmental Health, our ability to forecast and monitor adverse health outcomes, the Public Health Preparedness and Response center, the Global Health Center. So, so the idea that we need to cut in order to actually improve, I think is false.
- [23:14]
Sean Rameswaram
What do you think the effects are thus far of RFK's actions at CDC in public health more broadly?
- [23:23]
Ezekiel Emanuel
Well, you know what, here's the thing about public health. Public health, you invest today for the benefits tomorrow. So it will take a while to actually see in terms of real harms. But we're already seeing real harms in several ways. The first way is clearly the measles outbreak in Texas. Two kids dead, lots of hospitalizations. It's not just Texas now. It's spread across parts of the country. You're getting increasing vaccine skepticism. And parents who are uncertain don't study the issue, just are trying to, you know, make their lives go and can't really study these various issues. And when you get fewer and fewer people vaccinated, you are going to get disease outbreaks, whether today, tomorrow, or in a long time. We can't exactly predict. I also think, you know, if chronic diseases are big problem, which RFK Jr clearly agrees with, cutting back on our chronic disease programs, you know, our prevention programs, our response programs, our health promotion programs, that's not a good idea. Maybe we need to do them differently. But cutting is certainly not in the cards for all those chronic diseases. If you want to control healthcare costs, you gotta address chronic disease better. And cutting back, the CDC's role is not better.
- [24:52]
Sean Rameswaram
You know, we've been talking about chronic disease and vaccines. In the first half of the show, we talked to our colleague Dylan Scott about how RFK and the Trump administration buried a study about alcohol's links to cancer. And there's no clear explanation for why they not want this information to be in the hands of the public. Where do you think people, everyday Americans, should be turning to for health information if they feel like they can't trust the government anymore? And I guess that applies to, like, the people who are skeptical to begin with and all the people who are skeptical now.
- [25:31]
Ezekiel Emanuel
The problem with undermining the CDC is you undermine a single source of information objective, really where the goal is public health. Now it's gonna put more burden on people to get their information from a variety of sources. You know, on vaccines, maybe my good friend Mike Osterholm's project on vaccine integrity, or I think it's called the Vaccine Integrity Project. If you want to look it up online. In other areas like alcohol, you'll have to look at the old Surgeon General's report and try to get a copy of that that reported on alcohol's problems, especially related to cancer. But not exclusively. There are global. You know, alcohol is a global issue. So there are a lot of global resources available, whether England or Australia or the Cochrane Collaborative. But that requires a lot more effort. And that's one of the problems, is everyone's short on time, right? And spending a lot of time running around and looking for individual programs rather than being able to go to one site and readily access an objective answer, is a major, major problem. And that, I think is part of the plan for this administration, is make it very difficult to get this kind of information. And it's working, unfortunately.
- [26:59]
Sean Rameswaram
Ezekiel Emanuel. His friends call him Zeke. Rebecca Ibarra made this episode of Today Explained. Aminah Al Saadi edited Laurel Bullard, Fact checked. Adrian Lilly and Patrick Boyd mixed. Welcome back. Patrick.