Why has RFK Jr pulled $500m of mRNA vaccine funding?

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0:42Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Join host Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

1:15Marianna Spring:BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. It's all under the radar today. it's all going to be stuff that we might miss on an ordinary occasion but this time we're not going to miss it so it's a sort of scattergun approach there is going to be a ton of stuff but a lot of it's very important and a lot of it we've sort of bitten at before but we haven't properly chewed so jeffrey epstein will be there the economy will be there a few other things as well plus the meta question how much does any of this stuff actually matter or not matter welcome to americast americast americast from bbc news you're gambling with the lives of millions of people you're gambling with world war three president trump's message is very simple we are done being taken advantage of mr president in the name of our god have mercy upon the people who are scared now are you supportive of these onesies i'm supportive of vaccines what is happening like this is not America!

2:14This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like. Yeah!

2:29Marianna Spring:Hello, it is Marianna, aka Misinformation, back in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And it's Justin, sitting right next to her in the same place, and the time, quarter past two in the afternoon on Wednesday. We haven't been in the worldwide headquarters together for a while. That's exciting. Not much has changed, actually. We've got a new fake plant. A new fake plant, yeah. Same fake plant. And we've also ditched our Americans. We are doing it without Sarah's expertise and crucially as well without Anthony to provide all the facts. So it's going to be a wild ride. Yes. So we've obviously been talking a lot about Jeffrey Epstein and particularly there's been this whole kind of ongoing saga, obviously because Donald Trump had made this promise to kind of release this list of names of powerful people associated with Epstein.

3:14Marianna Spring:And so almost anyone and everyone you can think of who's quite powerful and famous from that period of time, about, say, 20 years ago or whatever, would somehow be connected to him or involved with him. No evidence at all that they did anything wrong while they were with him. That's the point, isn't it? So let's talk about the few things that are happening now in the news, because there are a few of them, and all of them matter separately, it seems to me. So, number one, you've got the House Oversight Committee, a very important committee of the House of Representatives, serious people on it, issuing not only subpoenas, but actually dates.

3:45They say, we want X on this date and Y on this date. And among X's and Y's, various attorney generals, former attorney generals, loads of them, but also Bill and Hillary Clinton, both of them on separate dates. They've kind of issued the subpoenas and said, come and tell us all you know about Epstein. My feeling about this is that it's a bit performative, actually. I think there is lots of Epstein news that really matters. But actually, and I saw some of it reported in the British press in a way that I just... Hang on a second, guys. You slightly got the wrong end of the stick here. Yes, you can be subpoenaed by a congressional committee, but you need to have probable cause.

4:22There needs to be some sort of evidentiary base for the subpoena. You can't just say, you, Mariana Spring, must come. I don't think they're turning up. I think they've got their lawyers, all these people, at least all the really powerful people who are not actually connected with the law. So certainly people on the list who aren't former attorneys general, they're just going to get their lawyers to say, what's the evidence that you have that you want us to?

4:48Marianna Spring:Well, to talk to us about. Yeah, exactly. And, for example, we do know that there's been lots of reporting that Bill Clinton is one of the people who'd taken trips with staff on Epstein's private plane that he'd met with Epstein in New York, etc., etc. But if you were Bill Clinton's lawyer, for example, surely you just turn around and say, well, yeah, we did do those things. But that doesn't mean that I'm guilty of any wrongdoing. But I guess if you're looking at this from Donald Trump's perspective, it distracts people or it sends people in a different direction. It's saying, hang on a second, I'm not the only powerful person who hung out with this bloke.

5:21Marianna Spring:And here's some more people who did. And you can all point the finger at them. And it's worth remembering the Clintons especially are catnip for what I often call conspiracy land. because Hillary Clinton was at the heart of some of these really sprawling conspiracy theories about children and satanic paedophiles and pizza restaurants. People might remember Pizzagate, all of that stuff. That was when Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton and QAnon and everything else focused so much on her. So throwing her into the mix is like, you know, if you know your conspiracy theories, that is probably what you would do.

5:53Yeah, and we're going to talk about her being thrown into the mix on a completely different subject, actually, in a second. So that's one thing, this list of subpoenas, which I don't think actually at this stage amounts to anything very solid. Number two event, though, is the suggestion that the entire discussion that was recently held between the deputy attorney general and Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of him, his partner and his partner in crime. She's serving 20 years for helping Epstein abuse young girls. So she had this meeting with the deputy attorney general, which itself felt strange.

6:30They're now talking about releasing a transcript of the entire discussion. And I mean, how does that play? I'm not quite sure why they would want to do it, because it seems to me just to open up a whole new can of worms and keep the subject in the headlines and all the rest of it, which actually, from the point of view of the Trump White House. Well, he himself was saying, wasn't he said a week or two ago, it's boring. Talk about other things. That's a good way of that not happening.

6:57Marianna Spring:Yeah, I think it will be interesting because on the one hand, you can understand how there are all sorts of accusations that, you know, oh, like lots of the people who are talking about this online are saying, hang on a second. Was this deal, if there has been a deal that's been made with Ghislaine Maxwell, was it about them deliberately like keeping Donald Trump's name out of it? Or are they kind of trying to hush her up a bit or that kind of thing? you imagine that the reason for releasing the transcript would be to show the opposite that somehow they think that the conversation shows that they weren't you know asking her to suppress any evidence or anything like that that very much it was her you know saying Donald Trump wasn't involved in any bad stuff and that perhaps other people were etc etc there are probably some some fairly reasonable people asking questions who might take that transcript at face value and say okay yeah fine I don't think Donald Trump was involved in the way that I was maybe thinking he might be and that he very strongly denies blah blah blah but lots of the people who are hyper online and the loudest online and have the most reach are highly likely to pour over that transcript and find something that no one anticipated that they then decide demonstrate some kind of and the problem is is i could see to some extent how maybe if you're donald trump and you're thinking about the wider public and trying to sort of distance yourself from epstein that maybe it could be beneficial if there's something particularly sort of smoking gun that was said that's interesting or whatever.

8:19Marianna Spring:But actually, when it comes to the sort of fringes online, it certainly won't do anything to quell them. And they are, to Donald Trump's dismay, I imagine, sort of spilling out into alternative media circles and other places. And that is a problem for him, really. And as we talk, CNN reporting that tonight, it's Wednesday, that a group of senior Republicans, including the vice president, J.D. Vance, are going to meet to decide what the heck to do. I'm not quoting exactly what CNN is saying, but effectively that's it. They've got to work out a strategy now. Do they release these transcripts? Do they try and do other things?

8:52You know, Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved to this low security jail in Texas. What's that about?

8:57Marianna Spring:Surely they kind of need to explain why that's happened. So do they do a big interview? The Rogan show was mentioned possibly by CNN. Someone goes on Rogan, maybe Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, the guy who went to see her and whose discussions might now be, the transcript of those discussions might be released. So does he do a big interview, Joe Rogan, to someone else? They need to try to capture this, to grasp it. What I would say, and I think is interesting, is if they did, for example, get someone to go on one of these alternative media outlets, I can see how in theory that could be quite an effective strategy because you're seen to be accountable to the people who are pushing these theories, listen to and trust, like Joe Rogan or some of the alternative media outlets.

9:39Marianna Spring:If you're Rogan, though, for example, or any of those alternative media outlets, you're not going to want to give whoever it is a very easy ride. No. And someone like Donald Trump is quite good at handling those sorts of interviews. But there are other people who won't be. And so it's a bit of a risk who you put in that position. Because, again, do you further fuel this stuff? And does it make it worse? We're going to move on because we have got a lot to get through. And they're huge subjects. So let's go on to the Russia business. So quick recap. 2016, there's an election. Hillary Clinton loses.

10:11Donald Trump wins. A lot of people are really surprised. Democrats think, what the heck's going on? Who is responsible for this terrible surprise? Oh, maybe it's Russia. And maybe it's not only Russia, but maybe Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, doing in Hillary Clinton, leaking bad stuff about it, et cetera, et cetera. There is a huge investigation. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, various other investigations as well. They decide in the end there is no evidence that there was collusion. But what the right have always said is that there is evidence that the Democrats and the left more broadly suggested to the American people that the Russians tried to get involved in that election.

10:53Not that they colluded with Donald Trump, but that they tried to get involved and may or may not have succeeded in various ways of pushing the election towards Donald Trump.

11:02Marianna Spring:There's also separately accusations levelled at Donald Trump in terms of his connections to Russia, his business interests, so on and so forth. We should hear one of those accusations, actually, because this is Hillary Clinton. Yeah, this is Hillary Clinton. This is what annoys him so much. This is what kind of energises Trump now. This is Hillary Clinton in 2016. It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear. You won't admit that the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, rake up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this world.

11:50race. So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election. So the question, did all the intelligence agencies make that conclusion and did they make it based on real evidence? That then brings us to bang up to date and this week and this grand jury investigation. Because what is now being suggested is that the grand jury need to look into criminal behavior behind the scenes in the Obama administration, including from the CIA who, and this is the allegation, who colluded together to make the case that Russia was involved when there was no evidence that that was actually the case.

12:56So that is the charge now against the Obama team and indeed against President Obama himself that there wasn't any evidence, just as we've just heard Hillary Clinton suggesting that there was, that all those intelligence agencies actually didn't want to say it, but were kind of forced into saying it for political reasons.

13:15Marianna Spring:Yeah, and actually exactly on that, we've got this clip from Tulsi Gabbard, who's the US Director of National Intelligence, and she's specifically talking about former President Barack Obama and his national security team. There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false. They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. So what they're talking about there specifically is this dossier that came from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence officer, a former intelligence officer, that had originally been got together as a result of opposition research that was being done by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

14:07Nothing illegal about that. You're allowed to do opposition research. They do do it. But they got this guy to get together a dossier of stuff that Trump had allegedly done in Russia. And there is no evidence that anything in the dossier is true. No one has ever managed to link any of it. And it involved prostitutes and, you know, kind of bad behavior in Moscow hotels and all the rest of people will remember the details. A lot of salacious stuff. No evidence it was true. And yet, and this is the charge that the federal grand jury are going to have to look at, the charge is that even though they actively knew that there was no evidence supporting this stuff, that this dossier was included in the general kind of totality of the documents that were put forward for the intelligence community and that it should not have been.

14:57So the idea now is that this grand jury meets and they consider charges against this range of people. But more widely than that, it kind of reinvigorates the MAGA base who have long been told that one of the things, one of the lies you're told about Donald Trump is that he is in with the Russians. and that not only is it not true, but that it's a slur that goes outside politics and actually is something that is criminal.

15:28Marianna Spring:I think that when it comes to, for example, the actual examples of influence operations on social media, there's lots of evidence to support that those did happen in some way. Their impact is quite hard to measure. And those are valid things for people to be very concerned about. Ultimately, it can also be true that those were probably beneficial to Donald Trump's campaign because they were divisive and they played into some of the issues that mattered to him. And it could very much be the case that those operations wanted Donald Trump to be elected because it benefited their interest. That doesn't necessarily, again, mean that Donald Trump colluded with them, even if he benefited from it in some way.

15:58Marianna Spring:The other thing is that, as we've just been talking about, Donald Trump is in a bit of a pickle with all this Epstein stuff and the accusations being leveled at him. And you could see how it would be very good to unite your base and to get them all talking about something else, which is a conspiracy that you can all agree on and dislike that is the other side's conspiracy. And that did happen. I mean, just what you said is absolutely the case. So MAGA world went mad when Tulsi Gabbard first said, we're going to go for these people and we're going to have this federal grand jury. It united them.

16:29Absolutely united them. Yeah, yeah. And I also wonder politically, I mean, yes, it gets them onto another subject, at least for a bit, though I think probably only for a bit because they're still really interested in Epstein. But number two, I just wonder actually whether it really cuts through in the way that Epstein does. Well, it feels more now, whereas the Russia stuff feels old, doesn't it? Yeah, it's historic. Right, let's go on to Robert Kennedy and something really interesting that he has done. So Robert Kennedy brought in to be in charge of America's health service by Trump. Hugely controversial, but actually hugely controversial for most people because of his views on vaccines.

17:05We've talked off and on about his campaigns against vaccines now from his perch. he's making a big move.

17:12Marianna Spring:Yeah, so his department are cancelling funding for a certain type of vaccine research. So mRNA vaccine research. And essentially, mRNA vaccines work by, this is your science lesson, teaching cells how to make proteins that can trigger an immune response. So they were made during the pandemic. Moderna and Pfizer, two of the big pharmaceutical companies, use these types of vaccines. So what this means is essentially $500 million or so in funding. 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies that won't be happening in the same way and it's worth saying that this type of vaccine in particular triggered quite a lot of disinformation during the pandemic and because of the way it creates proteins people would then suggest that it could somehow alter your dna in that it was trying to like fundamentally harm you or change you in a way that there just wasn't evidence and rfk has been particularly skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccines.

18:08Marianna Spring:And when he was questioned originally, when he was first before he became health secretary, he did say, you know, I'm not anti-vaccine, but he was very sceptical of the COVID vaccines in some ways that were legitimate and in some ways that went beyond what the scientific evidence tells us. And I think the worry now from quite a lot of scientists, for example, who work in researching this type of technology is, oh no, some of that anti-vaccine attitude could actually impact national wellbeing because they think these kinds of vaccines are really important in terms of investing in them to deal with another pandemic, say, if it were to happen.

18:39Let's hear what the man himself says. He was talking at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. For some illnesses, mRNA vaccines may be very useful, and that would include cancers. But for upper respiratory infections, we cancelled 22 trials for upper respiratory infections. But right now we're developing a universal vaccine at NIH. And so it's a vaccine that mimics natural immunity and it could be effective. We believe it's going to be effective against not only coronaviruses, but also flu. And it's going to be a much safer and much more effective vaccine. It's always difficult to know what to make a Rubber Kennedy, isn't it?

19:24Because he sort of talks the talk when it comes to, we're just asking questions, you know, we're just doing the science.

19:30Marianna Spring:I think the issue here is that RFK has advocated more accountability for the big pharmaceutical companies. But there's a difference between accountability for companies in terms of ensuring that the products they're offering are safe and tested properly, etc. And then actually kind of fundamentally disputing the science. For example, Kennedy has said in a statement in relation to this decision, said his team had reviewed the science, listened to the experts and acted. The data shows these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. now lots of scientists very much disagree with that health experts have said for example that viruses mutate regardless of whether a vaccine exists for them and like there might be some elements to what he's saying that have a kernel of truth but exactly and then lots of other experts and when when he says for example reviewed the science listen to the experts which experts because kennedy on the whole has been very supportive of some of the people who are quite controversial in so much as they've often been, they've often very much gone against the medical or scientific establishment or consensus of opinion.

20:34Marianna Spring:And ultimately, if we think about the long term impact of this, like vaccinations ultimately rely on lots of people getting them. So it's problematic if someone is kind of advocating, well, actually, don't get them if you don't want to type thing, because it's just not how they work. But I think with this, the wider issue is, you know, that there's all sorts of quite positive discussions about vaccines that might be used to treat things even beyond pandemics and stuff like cancer and does the lack of investment in some of these new technologies or the wariness expressed pose a fundamental problem like does it mean that actually stuff that could be really important in the future just isn't invested in maybe that you know that money will be redirected to other places and and there'll be different kinds of research etc etc but essentially public health is a lot about trust and trust in the science and trust in medicine and if you slowly but surely keep undermining that has ramifications.

21:23That leads us brilliantly onto our last subject, which is the economy, and specifically the ramifications of the sacking of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics boss. Basically, this is the big agency in the US that produces job numbers. It's not a political agency. It just says how many people, how many extra jobs have been created or not created, etc. So the department revised down the recent job numbers by a quarter of a million. Donald Trump said that was rigged to make the administration look bad. He is doubling down on that now. Not only has he sacked this person, he has also called in to CNBC's Squawk Box financial news program and talked about the rigged numbers.

22:07Here he is. Days before the election, they put out numbers that it was like the country was on fire, was doing so well. And then they did a revision about two weeks later, and the revision was down by almost 900 ,000 jobs. You remember that? And I said, man, I said, what would have happened? What would have happened if I lost? Think of it. I would have said they gave phony numbers and then they revised them a week and a half later. Those were benchmark numbers. That happens. They do that. They do that twice a year, and it reconciles the monthly figures with the overall numbers. And it was a big number.

22:48And obviously, the numbers were rigged. The numbers were rigged. Biden wasn't doing well. He was doing poorly. They announced these phenomenal numbers two days before the election. And a little bit before that, always these great numbers. And you knew it wasn't doing well. You knew prices were through the roof and inflation was terrible. The whole thing was bad. But think of it. Then they did the biggest revision, I think, in history of almost 900 ,000 jobs. And it turned out to be more than that because later on they did another revision. And you can hear the kind of horror in CNBC anchors' voices.

23:23Trying to interrupt. Trying to interrupt and trying to say, oh, no, hang on a second. All of this always happens. There is always a revision of the figures because we then establish what we actually do think was the truth, etc., etc. etc. Online, Mariana, is there a kind of sense of, does it matter that he's sacked her? Does it matter that he's challenging the figures themselves? Are there any facts anymore?

23:45Marianna Spring:Well, yeah, I think this is sort of the point. I mean, this is Donald Trump's playbook, the risk that it poses, kind of as we go back to the beginning of the episode, like the Epstein stuff, is that it can ultimately undermine you later down the line or be weaponised against you. And in this case, it's like, well, when it goes well, if it does end up going well at any point, how are we supposed to then trust that those figures are right if they were not right the last time and then they are right when they're good? I think what ultimately, we've chatted about this a lot, what will prove to be a problem for Donald Trump, it might not, but what could prove to be a problem, is if these numbers are felt by people in a way that contradicts what he's saying.