Has Trump lost ‘Make America Healthy Again’ voters?

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1:07Vaccines have re-entered the mainstream of American politics again this week, and that's because Donald Trump signed an executive order which is calling for fewer vaccines to be given to American children. It's just the latest attempt from the White House to try and change the way the vaccine schedule is administered in the United States because, according to the president, it's been putting children in danger. And I saw this early on and I've seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's body. And bad things happen in many cases, too many cases, because this is an explosion.

1:45This is an epidemic. Now, Donald Trump's claims are in many cases factually inaccurate and without evidence, but they are something he has stuck to for years and years and has been trying to push through as policy, despite the fact his own advisers are deeply worried about this ahead of midterm elections because it's not something that polls well at all. So why is he so determined to try and push through these changes when it could cost crucial votes? Welcome to AmeriCast. americast americast from bbc news you hear that sound oh i think when i hear that sound it reminds me of money we didn't start this war but under president trump we are finishing it this is a big cover-up and this administration is engaged in it this guy has trump arrangement syndrome i have four words for you turn the volume up

2:41Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it's Anthony right next to Sarah here in Washington, D.C. And it is Mariana in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And we have convened to talk about childhood vaccines and the fact that vaccine policy is back in the headlines and back in the political mainstream in the United States because Donald Trump has signed an executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccines and recommending that the MMR shots for measles, mumps and rubella be split up rather than administered all at one time. So this is trying to end decades of federal guidance on which vaccines should be administered to children.

3:18And he's calling on states to reconsider vaccine mandates from schools. And he did this with R.A.K. Jr., his health secretary, standing behind him in the Oval Office. He has long cast doubt on the safety of the MMR vaccine and connected it to autism, as has Donald Trump, despite the fact that multiple studies have found no connection between the shots and autism. So why is the president doing this now? Well, let's have a listen to him as he was announcing that executive order this week in the Oval Office. For long and far too long, long period of time, America's recommended more childhood vaccines than any pure nation and even twice as many doses as some European countries.

4:00And even more than that, in many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children. effective immediately my administration is recognizing gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases along with the mmr which hopefully will be split up and i saw this early on and i've seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's body. And bad things happen in too many cases, because this is an explosion. This is an epidemic.

4:45All right, I guess we're gonna have to unpack a lot of what he said there, because it is not backed up by science. The 72 figure that he gave, the jabs, that isn't just into infants or babies even. That's over the course of an entire childhood going to 18 years old, and that would include annual flu shots and annual COVID shots. And talking about the amount of vaccine injected in a dose, it's not a bottle of soda size. I think the MMR vaccine is about the size of a teaspoon. Oh, a fraction of that, I think, actually. And so this is something that we've heard from Donald Trump for a very long time, though.

5:24I remember him in 2015 in a presidential debate talk about having a friend who had the MMR vaccine and then a week later diagnosed with autism. And he talks about not wanting to have all of these doses all at once and to spread them out. He talked about Baird and his son and how they spread out the doses for him. So a familiar theme from Donald Trump, but hearing it from the Oval Office and having a direct policy is something definitely very different. Yeah. And, you know, it's worth we're going to unpack a bit more the relationship between RFK Jr. and some of these claims without evidence about the MMR vaccine, but they are sort of a staple of the very active anti-vaccine movement on social media.

6:09And that's not to say that there aren't valid questions and concerns about vaccinations. Of course there are. And there are also times where, you know, different health bodies, doctors and so on and so forth will recommend changing actually, right? Let's adapt and let's offer this vaccination or not offer this one or, you know, that's normal, as is it normal to test out vaccinations and to evolve them. But this MMR stuff all goes back to, which we've chatted about on AmeriCast before, this research that came out from a guy called Andrew Wakefield, who is now a sort of bit of a poster boy, really, for the anti-vaccine movement, and who was widely discredited for the claims that he made about the links between the MMR vaccine and autism.

6:47But nonetheless, they have continued to persist, not least because they're incredibly emotive claims, right? And people are worried about their kids and wanting to make sure that, yeah, they don't put them at risk of coming to harm in any way. But a lot of what's being said here, as you both highlighted, is not backed up by the doctors and scientists who have a long track record of looking into and understanding this technology. I mean, of course, you've explained to us many times before the way in which conspiracy theories are particularly vulnerable to going around and around and around on the Internet and why people get swept up in them.

7:17But I mean, we have been talking for decades about the fact that this has been debunked by science. Why will it not die? What I would say has really inflamed the anti-vaccine movement online is obviously the pandemic. There were lots of questions over the speed at which the vaccines came out, valid questions about big pharmaceutical companies and how they benefit from doing that and everything else. But often then that's been extrapolated to fuel further distrust in and discussion around vaccinations more generally, including childhood vaccinations. and the movement, the anti-vaccination movement around the pandemic, obviously focused on the COVID vaccines, but actually people like RFK Jr.

7:56and all kinds of other social media profiles and influencers benefited from posting about COVID restrictions and the jabs and everything else, and then kind of further questioning in general, like, you know, scientific bodies and doctors and the research that they do, which is again not to say that those places or people don't get stuff wrong. Of course they do. and science by its very nature is often evolving and adapting and all that kinds of stuff. But this is people saying things often that are extremely untrue and or without evidence. RFK Jr. always says he's not an anti-vaxxer, but he just is concerned about people who've been harmed by vaccinations, which is true, but is a small number of people.

8:33And so I think that the combination of COVID and then, and I think this is why it's happening right now, is a desire. Yeah. And I wonder what you think, Anthony, but a desire for Donald Trump to cling on to the, as we call them, the Maha Moms, the Make America Healthy Again moms or not just moms, dads too, who follow RFK Jr. in particular, and who actually really were drawn to the arguments that Donald Trump made in the build up to his election around sort of opposing what was perceived to be, you know, doctors and scientists misleading people or not letting them make up their own minds about vaccinations and other issues, this kind of independence when it comes to health decisions.

9:14I feel like this is Donald Trump trying to kind of rally that voter section, which he won, perhaps maybe to his surprise, actually, and perhaps partly because of RFK Jr. Yeah, there's definitely a political component to this. And you talk about the Maha Moms and it's their interests go beyond vaccines. Maybe this was a specific way Trump calculated that he would be able to get their attention, something that was under White House control, that they could announce this guidance. First of all, it's guidance. It's not changing the rules. States would have to do that. And drug manufacturers, the ones who do the MMR vaccine, have said they're not going to split it up.

9:48So it's a question about how much this is actually going to change things on the ground. But it is something that Trump could hold a press conference about and have a high profile thing, have RFK Jr. next to him, and maybe help win back, as you mentioned, some of those Maha moms. But it is something that's bigger than just vaccines. As I say, it's about keeping pesticides out of food. It's about taking on big chemical companies as well as big pharmaceutical companies. And that's one area where Trump's track record hasn't been all that great. There are a lot of people in this movement, And I'm sure you can talk about it, Marianna, who are not thrilled with the way Trump has handled, say, regulating pesticides and regulating food additive companies.

10:31He hasn't done a whole lot because there have been countervailing forces pushing him around on this. There are corporate interests that he respects and wants to keep on the Republican Party's sides that would limit the ability of putting in new government regulations there, Whereas a press conference at the White House on vaccines is pretty easy and that's not going to get the same kind of pushback from within his own constituencies. Yeah, and it's fascinating to think, isn't it, about the different constituencies that saying this will appeal to or get their attention. So you've got the moms who are maybe more concerned about nutrition, but are interested in vaccines.

11:08It'll pique their attention. But you've got a whole other section of Trump's base who buy into deep state conspiracy theories and the idea that there are forces working against them that Donald Trump uniquely can confront. And of course, by signing something like this, he's also saying to them, I'm on your side. I'm not beholden to whether it's the corporate interests or the scientific think that it's trying to dupe people into doing what they're told. It's really interesting because I think the point you were saying before, Anthony, about how a lot of these Maha moms are basically wellness influencer adjacent or wellness influencers themselves.

11:47And they are really into nutrition and they are really concerned about health and the health of their kids and all this kinds of stuff. And there is certainly a feeling when you spend any time sort of looking at their content that Donald Trump hasn't necessarily lived up to what they'd hoped in terms of what he would do to advance the kind of wellness and health of America. And obviously, recently, there's been loads of focus on other things like foreign policy and everything else. And that's, again, had an impact on the economy. And all of that actually makes it harder to live in a healthy way and to kind of push your wellness agenda, positive or negative.

12:22so you can see why they've not been feeling like his biggest fan but actually and to the two different types of supporters you mentioned there Sarah who would be I think interested in or have their interest piqued by this announcement both of those groups of people the mahamams and the people who kind of dip their toes in the slightly more conspiratorial and are very much of the view that there are elite cabals of bad people doing things way beyond actual examples of that this is almost an attempt to win back a kind of mixture of people online who no longer feel like Donald Trump entirely represents what they thought he did.

12:58And vaccinations is a safe, quote unquote, quote unquote, way of doing that, even if actually could have very serious consequences. Yeah, we don't have to really read between the lines too much. I mean, Donald Trump specifically thanked Maha Moms at this Oval Office event the other day. He is aware of them. And there were influencers there in the room. But, you know, you say, Mariana, that this seems like a safe way for Trump to keep his base together and go after something that would win back this healthy movement. But the reality is it's also going to be running headfirst into media skepticism, skepticism from the public writ large, which actually has a lot of faith generally in vaccines and don't want to see these kind of limitations on vaccine.

13:40I mean, let's listen to RFK Jr. He was on CNN the other day, and he was having a back and forth with Dana Bash. The communities that are suffering from measles are almost all religious communities that just don't vaccinate. The Mennonites have not vaccinated since 1796, since Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine. It's hard to blame that. I mean, as much as you want to blame it. No, I don't want to blame you. I'm asking you because you have a very powerful voice on these issues for people who are skeptical back let me finish i've never questioned the efficacy of the mmr vaccine okay let me let me finish what i want you to do is please use your bully pulpit to right now as we're getting close to back to school say are you willing to say to parents who have not vaccinated their kids that they should vaccinate their kids for measles because it is safe and it will help them save their children's lives.

14:38We tell people on my websites, my public right now, that parents should get their children vaccinated for measles. A measles vaccine is effective. It stops measles in about 97 % of the cases. People should get vaccinated. Well, that's very interesting, isn't it, that he is prepared to look into the camera and say that people should get vaccinated, although he's not directly recommending that they get an MMR vaccine there. I'm sure he would still say that they ought to be split up. But he's having to say that because the number of measles cases has significantly increased since all of this scepticism, since Donald Trump was re-elected and he was made the health secretary.

15:20And it's really, really worried a lot of doctors and scientific community, the number of kids who are unvaccinated and who are now getting measles. And we should say, shouldn't we, what? they're no longer recommending children to get vaccinated for it, as well as saying they want to split up the MMR vaccine. Taken off the list, if Donald Trump had his way for mandatory vaccines, would be rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, men and cockle disease, and a couple of other things, including dengue fever. And people are very worried, particularly about hepatitis B being removed from that schedule. Although, Anthony, you pointed out this has not become federal law because there was a court ruling a few months ago that stopped them from being able to do that.

16:00So this is a strong recommendation. But I mean, if there's ever a bully pit sitting in the Oval Office and telling people what they ought not to do, it's a pretty big one. Yeah, and there's a case of dengue fever diagnosed in Virginia just recently transmitted by a mosquito. One of the things that people are worried about is climate change and mosquitoes becoming more prevalent through a lot of the United States. And some of these tropical diseases like that that haven't been as prominent might become more of a concern. So there's a debate on that. And I think that is something that parents will have to discuss and school districts and states will have to discuss.

16:35But when the administration comes out and issues guidance like this, I think you can see in the polling that, at least among Donald Trump supporters, there becomes an increasing skepticism of vaccines. And that will affect how many people say, get the measles vaccine. So, you know, you need people in public health like RFK Jr. coming out and saying, no, this is a good idea, even if he did so. And that clip pretty reluctantly, it sounded like. There was a lot of conversation and I guess more media coverage of outbreaks of, for example, measles and the impact in places like Texas and concerns about the reduced uptake in the MMR vaccine.

17:13And it feels like those headlines have dissipated somewhat, not least because there's just loads of other stuff going on. Do you think that that could also play into why it feels less controversial to kind of announce this now in the way Donald Trump has than it could have felt even like six months ago? Yeah, it's hard to say this when the headlines are about a measles outbreak in Texas or elsewhere in the country. So the timing may be good. It's not so close to the midterms that it's going to be top of people's minds. But polling from Donald Trump's own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has shown that the public generally is in favor of vaccines, that they don't want to have people have people in power, people in responsibility, cast aspersions on vaccines and undermine this.

18:02This is not a winning political issue outside of a very small subset of Trump supporters. So, you know, I find it interesting that there was that report just what last month or so where Donald Trump was having a conversation with RFK Jr. Telling him that he was getting the yips and he should focus on, again, addressing vaccines because there was reporting earlier in the year about how the White House and not Donald Trump, but White House and political advisers were telling everyone in the Republican Party, distance yourself from vaccine skepticism. Don't associate yourself with this because it could cost you votes.

18:38And if you remember Donald Trump's State of the Union address at the beginning of this year, he didn't mention vaccines or Maha type stuff around it at all. And that was, I think, a choice made by his political people to try to try to move away from that. So it is interesting that there has been a renewed focus on this. And maybe it's just because Trump really does legitimately believe this. He's been talking about it for decades. And even before he ran for president, he brings this up and bringing this up in radio interviews and elsewhere. This is this is something that, you know, I think we can legitimately say, you know, is a core closely held belief that Donald Trump has that that autism is in fact caused by vaccines, despite there being no evidence of that.

19:22Now, Mariana, you said originally one of the reasons why vaccine scepticism has taken off again is because of COVID-19. And we all know that there was a lot of controversy around the vaccine there as well, which is back in the headlines again, because the man most associated with that in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was up in front of the Senate. We've talked before about how he refused to answer any of their questions and said he was taking the Fifth Amendment all the time. But they also released a whole series of text messages from him from 2021, showing him and other health officials discussing the risks and the benefits of the COVID vaccine.

20:00Anthony, remind us, how is it that the Senate is able to be showing us what he wrote in his own personal diary and text messages he was sending from back during the pandemic? The personal diary is kept on a government computer, which that alone gives the government access to it. The same thing with these text messages. He was doing them from his government issued phone. And I think, you know, if you work for a private employer and you're using private property, your employer has access to that. The same goes with the federal government. So they were able to request through IT and get a hold of this.

20:32I mean, they got a hold of 34 ,000 text messages Fauci sent. And and I think they've only released about 11 of them. And these, as you mentioned, were ones dealing with a kind of a back and forth discussion about whether to recommend the covid vaccine for pregnant women, about if they have a spike in fever, would that cause a risk to the pregnancy, a risk of miscarriage? Of course, there was also a very real risk of miscarriage if you get COVID and get very sick when you're pregnant. And that was part of this discussion. But it has been presented by some of the conservatives on this committee investigating it as a kind of a smoking gun, that he was not being fully open with the public about the potential risks of the COVID vaccine.

21:16And it has been exaggerated by some to be evidence that pregnant women shouldn't have taken the COVID vaccine. And there were all of these miscarriages. And again, this is one of those instances, Mariano, where you get a little kernel of truth and then it becomes something much bigger online and gets shrouded in all of this misinformation. You're giving people sort of what feels like raw evidence to pour over. Right. So they've got like some examples of messages that have been sent, but often without the full context. And people will then take from those messages what fits with their argument.

21:48So, for example, if you're really opposed to vaccinations, you're like, right, this is proof that actually they're all conspiring to cause harm to people with vaccines. For example, women who are pregnant and that's really dangerous and bad. And while obviously transparency is helpful and also being able to ask questions of people making decisions about health is really important. and they don't always get things right. There's also often when you see this stuff being unpicked on social media, a real lack of understanding about the wider context and the way that medicine and immunology works, which a lot of it is about sort of risk versus benefit.

22:22And, you know, nothing is ever like 100 % safe. It's just not how it works. And no good doctor or medic or physician of any sort will tell you, right, that's absolutely going to work or that's absolutely not going to work. It's like the way those conversations happen. And so when these kinds of messages are provided, but without the full context, it's very easy for people who, for example, oppose vaccinations to run with it and to really inflame the anti-vaccine sentiment. And I would say everything around Fauci recently has also kind of inflamed that distrust in health officials and distrust in medicine and vaccines and could also partly explain why Donald Trump decided to announce this stuff about vaccines as well, because it feels like it's back in the public consciousness in a way that it kind of hadn't been because everything had calmed down a bit after the pandemic.

23:08And the Senate committee are targeting Anthony Fauci, not so much over the vaccine, but in fact, they're trying to establish that he knew what the origins of Covid were and that they came from a Chinese lab, not from a wet market, that he knew that and that he was covering that up or even actually that he in some ways funded the research that led to the creation of the Covid virus in the first place. They've not yet managed to establish that, not least because Anthony Fauci wouldn't answer any of their questions. What are the politics, Anthony, behind dragging him up in front of the Senate now so many years later?

23:42What are they trying to achieve? Yeah, it feels like you're relitigating things from 2020. Again, I mean, we've talked about the 2020 presidential election, and now we're going through the same sort of thing with COVID. You know, Fauci has been a villain among a certain segment of the right, even dating back before the COVID pandemic, when his handling of the AIDS epidemic. I remember there was a documentary called Plandemic that had Fauci and his handling of that prominently featured and that he was this scheming person that was trying to expand government control by using his position with epidemiology and virology.

24:22That's part of it, I think, is that they're bringing it up again because they have the reins of power and they can do it. I think there is maybe a thought that this will motivate the base, midterms or base elections. Generally, it's turnout that decides who wins and who loses midterms because there's no presidential matchup that really engages the public. So if you can find an issue that gets your people to go to the polls when they may not otherwise, then you want to try to juice that up. And so here you're juicing up the vaccine skepticism, all of the anger over COVID, where a lot of people on the right, people who may have been not regular voters, felt like they needed to show up to push back against government mandates and government controls or try to refresh that in a lot of people's memories.

25:07And that will get them to once again show up and vote in November. And we were saying that it's not necessarily good politics to be expressing this kind of vaccine skepticism, that polling suggests that that's not that popular. Is reminding people of COVID and of things they didn't like about that, like schools being shut down, workplaces, some of the government decisions, not necessarily made by Anthony Fauci, but the way in which government handled the COVID pandemic in America. Reminding them about that, is that better politics, do you think? Yeah, I think it is because that animates the base, even though not just it wasn't Fauci making these recommendations, it was Donald Trump and his administration for the first year of the pandemic in 2020 that was pushing this.

25:49It was Donald Trump and his administration that was overseeing Operation Warp Speed that got this vaccine, this COVID vaccine out into the public in record breaking time. So it is kind of also ironic that the fingers are being pointed by Republicans against Democrats when it was not just Democrats who were pushing some of the stuff, particularly in the first months of the pandemic. But yeah, I think they see this as potentially politically advantageous, whether that gets anywhere close to matching the concerns of the economy and the Iran war. I think that's unlikely, but on the margins, maybe it helps.