RFK Jr. on Dietary Guidelines, Vaccines, & Trump | KMP Ep.22

0:00Katie Miller:If you would look at a young mother today and say, as secretary of HHS, what would you currently recommend that I give my child upon birth? You know, we've made our recommendations. And as an agency, I don't give medical advice individuals because I'm not a doctor and I'm not competent to do that. What I would say to people is do your own research. What's the biggest roadblock in trying to make America healthy again? I mean, the biggest roadblock is the power of vested interest, of the pharmaceutical cartel, and of the big food, and an economic system that through nobody's particular fault has rewarded very, very addictive foods.

0:42Katie Miller:How do you handle negative news stories? The only people whose opinion really matters to me is God, Cheryl, and President Trump, and in that order. You know, the interesting thing about the president is that he eats really bad food, and you don't know how he's walking around, much less being the most energetic person any of us have ever met. He's in incredible health.

1:17Katie Miller:Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller Podcast. We are live every Tuesday night at 6 p.m. Eastern. Today, we're so excited to be at Health and Human Services in downtown D.C., joined by the one and only Bobby Kennedy. Good to be here, Katie. You're my second favorite person in your marriage. The other one, Cheryl, we already had on the episode, and she spilled some of your deep, dark secrets, which include that you take sauerkraut with you out to parties. I do. Do you still take sauerkraut with you? I went to dinner at the Ned last night, and I brought my sauerkraut.

1:54Katie Miller:Do you buy it at Whole Foods, or do you make it yourself? I do not make it myself. I get it. There's an extraordinary selection at Whole Foods and at some other places. is there's an entire wall of fermented vegetables. Oh, I just pick and choose. Do you go yourself? Do I shop by myself? My daughter does it for me. That's very nice. So this week has been a big week at HHS. You've had two major announcements, which I think reshape global public health for decades, and it's what the president ran on, And importantly, when he selected you to be HHS secretary, he said, Bobby, go wild on health. And I would describe this week as wild on health.

2:43Katie Miller:Would you agree? Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, these are two major initiatives that I've been praying for for 20 years. And one of them was to flip the food pyramid and actually tell Americans that they should be eating real food. which means whole foods, something that comes from the ground or the water or the air, and to cut ultra-processed foods, refined carbohydrates, salt and sugars from their diet. And that is kind of one of the principle changes and revolutionary changes that we really need. The food pyramid was hijacked by the food industry. You know, it's interesting. One of the, like, this is the first time I got support from the American Medical Association and from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which I'm in litigation with on the vaccine issue.

3:40Katie Miller:Did you reach out to them before the dietary guidelines? They reached out to me. Actually, Robert McCullough, who's the head of the American Medical Association, sent me a letter the day that I took office and said, we want to work with you on some of these issues. And that was very refreshing. And he said, we're committed not to doctors' visits. We're committed to making Americans healthier. And he came to the announcement. It was, you know, that was very gratifying for me. But the one group that didn't, that has been critical of me has been the American Heart Association. and the American Heart Association takes hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars from the processed food industry.

4:28And one of the reasons that we had these dietary guidelines with fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid is, you know, they were, those guidelines were crafted by the mercantile impulses of those corporations and they got validation from the American Heart Association. American Heart Association was telling people to eat carbohydrates rather than protein and saturated fats and vegetables and fruits. They were fine with that, and they didn't tell anybody that they were taking all this money from, you know, that they were in the tank with the ultra-processed food companies. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are two of their biggest owners, which are big.

5:12They don't just make soda. They make a whole range of ultra-processed foods. And then the other announcement we made this week was about resetting the vaccine schedule. And you know all about that. When I was a kid, I got three vaccines. Kids today get 80 vaccines, 80 doses of about 18 vaccines. And in 1980, it was 23 doses of seven vaccines. and this was all, you know, there was not good science behind the vaccine schedule. We know that vaccines are effective in preventing disease, that many of them are. Measles will prevent measles, generally speaking. But we know very little about the risk profile of those products because vaccines are the only medical device or medical intervention that is exempted or pharmaceutical product that's exempted from pre-licensing safety trials.

6:12So none of the vaccines on the schedule, with the exception of the COVID vaccine, none of them had ever been safety tested in a placebo-controlled trial, pre-licensers. So, and then the surveillance systems, you know what the industry and what the medical cartel will tell you is that, well, yeah, we're not safety testing them up front. We have a very good surveillance system so that we'll be able to spot injuries if they happen, and then we'll be able to recalibrate the vaccine. As it turns out, that's not true either. The surveillance systems for injuries are completely broken. They have two.

6:54One is the VAERS system, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and that system is broken. It was designed to fail.

7:06Katie Miller:Do you think doctors, when there is a vaccine injury or a mother calls into the overnight line to report that their child has a fever or isn't doing well post-vaccination, do you think those are grossly underreported? I know they're grocery unreported. And CDC actually did a study of that question in 2010. And the study was the lead author and the study was Lazarus. So you can look it up under Lazarus 2010. And that study compared, it actually created a machine counting system that was very efficient in collecting all vaccine injuries. and it compared the machine counting system in one HMO, Harvard Pilgrim up in Boston.

7:51It compared the injury reports that were reported by a machine automatically reported to the voluntary ones. And the conclusion was that fewer than 1 % of vaccine injuries were ever reported. So that is gross underreporting. And the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, which is the ultimate arbiter of vaccine safety, has said that any study that's based upon VAERS is automatically deficient. And so the only system that CDC really has, or the system for reporting vaccine injury, is broken. Their other system, which is called the Vaccine Safety Data Link, is also designed to fail.

8:38And that's a system where the HMOs show about 10 HMOs share their data, about 11 million patients. And they're supposed to, the CDC is supposed to go in that data, look at the vaccinations those kids have received, look at future injury claims, and then do a cluster analysis. and that system has been designed so that independent scientists can never look at it and the studies are very very controlled to show no injury so you know we don't have a really good we have no idea really what the risk profile is for these products.

9:23Katie Miller:Well I just think about this because when you made the announcement about changing the vaccine schedule and going to a lesser number and creating more optionality and choice for mothers. Because for example, one of my children had a severe, severe reaction to the rotavirus vaccine. I did not give my other two children the rotavirus vaccine after that. And I'm like, I've never even heard of rotavirus. Why am I vaccinating my children? And so as you become a mother, I think more people wake up or more parents would say parents wake up to what is being pushed upon them in an office of what is just, this is status quo, this is what you do to have a healthy child in the United States.

10:03Katie Miller:And what I would say is when a parent calls a pediatrician's office and I say my child's having an adverse reaction, I would be hard-pressed to think that that's ever reported into any of the two systems that you just described. I think the pediatrician just says, okay, give Tylenol. Let me know if it gets worse. Yeah, and they're not reported. And what we found now from looking at the VAERS system is that a lot of doctors will sign on to report, but it takes about a half an hour and it's very unwieldy. And about 80 % of them quit before they finish. And then, you know, for many injuries that are long-term injuries, things like perhaps allergies or seizures, stuff that shows up, neurological disorders that aren't diagnosed for years.

10:51I would say that the chance of that ever being reported as vaccine injury is about zero. And of course, a physician has a lot of disincentives about reporting. One is the medical boards don't like a lot of reports and they make that clear to the physicians. But also, if you're a doctor and a mother comes in and the baby gets a vaccine and then five days later it has a seizure, the doctor you know understandably does not really tell that mother oh that could be a vaccine injury which I just gave your child saying it's going to help them and they'll say well seizures are just normal at that age so that you know I think that happens a lot it does happen it happened to

11:36Katie Miller:us it happened to us and I would say that like what upsets me the most is that a doctor could say, I feel that this is tied to a vaccine. And I can guarantee you what happened to my family was never reported. And so if it's happening to my family, I can't imagine the number of people that it happens to across our country where, you know, the reason why I feel so passionately and I'm so grateful for the work you're doing here is because when it happens to you, you don't realize how bad it is. And so I think a lot of moms, when the legacy media laughs at them or says, we definitely need to give all of our kids the vaccines the same way we watch women guzzle Tylenol on TikTok.

12:17Katie Miller:I think it's one of those things where you're saying, thank God that there's common sense restored. You mentioned the rotavirus vaccine. And that's a good case. The rotavirus, I never heard of rotavirus until I started doing this work. Rotavirus does affect children in developing nations because diarrhea is a major cause of death, and it causes diarrhea. In this country, the death rate from rotavirus prior to the introduction of the vaccine was about three kids a year. And since the introduction of the vaccine, the data, you know, one of the studies show that it's dropped to two deaths a year.

13:01So that means to – and we don't know whether that's a statistical anomaly. Emily, those numbers are so small, you can't really make any conclusions of them. But that means that you're giving 3 million vaccines a year to kids, and you're saving one life. And what that means is if any of those vaccines are causing a death, that it completely cancels any benefit out of all of those vaccines that have been given to kids. And as you say, there are injuries. The first rotavirus vaccine that they approved caused insusception at such high rates. It was clearly much worse than the disease. It was killing kids.

13:51It's a very agonizing condition. And so, you know, just even the idea that we needed it in this country was kind of crazy. And the European countries don't require it. And, you know, so we've switched back. I'll give you another example with hepatitis B.

14:08Katie Miller:I was just about to go there. We vaccinate 96.8 % of the population who don't need it when they could easily just test a mother in the hospital for hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is transmitted through sexual activity, unprotected sex, and through intravenous drug use, through sharing needles. And then you can also, a baby can get a decent chance of getting hepatitis B if the mother is infected and traveling through the birth canal. But mothers are supposed to all be tested when they go into an American hospital. So those kids are kids that you should give the vaccine to. but the rate of death in children from hepatitis B was about 1 in 7 million.

15:01The rate of chronic disease in children is probably around 1 in 60 or 70 ,000. That means you have to give 70 ,000 hepatitis B vaccines to avert one case of chronic disease. And if you give 70 ,000 vaccines, people are going to get injured like your child was injured. And so, you know, in some cases, some of these vaccines may be causing more problems than they're averting. And we can't make that prediction because we don't know the risk profile for these products because we've never done safety testing. The safety tests that were done, there's two hepatitis B vaccines allowed in this country, one by GSK, the other by Merck.

15:51The GSK version was tested for four days, safety tested. That's all. So if the baby died on the fifth day, it never happened. If the baby got sick or died 10 days later, it never happened. And the study group, I think, for that vaccine was 343 kids. It's a product you're giving to 3 million kids a year. And there's nothing that you can tell from 343 kids.

16:22Katie Miller:Are you going to work to split the MMR vaccine into individuals? Because in the EU, you can split them into two. But here in the U.S., you still have to do all as one combination. Is that something you would take a look at? It's something that we're looking at, and we actually looked at the feasibility of that and the availability. You know, in Japan, they break it up, and they give three different vaccines. So we looked at the feasibility and the availability in this country, and there's complications to it. It's something that we're continuing. The president asked us to look at that, so we're looking at it very closely.

16:58Katie Miller:So as a pregnant mother who have gone through various forms of vaccination for all three of my children, if you would look at a young mother today and say, as secretary of HHS, what would you currently recommend that I give my child upon birth? You know, we've made our recommendations. And as an agency, I don't give medical advice to individuals because I'm not a doctor and I'm not competent to do that. But what I would say to people is do your own research. That, you know, this idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn't do that. A good mother, when you buy a car, you look at the Yelp reviews when you go, you know, or you go to Consumer Reports.

17:44And everybody does research on that as well. The most important decisions you're making are about your children's health. And when you buy a baby carriage, you make sure or a baby seat for your automobile. You look at the consumer reports. You look at the Yelp report. You do your own research. And mothers are worried about putting baby formula in plastic bottles. You know, we worry about all of these things. And so for somebody to tell you, you should not ask questions about a major medical intervention that is designed to permanently alter your immune system for the rest of your life. And for which there's no safety testing effectively.

18:33And for which there's been no testing at all to look at the vaccines in combination. Those are things that I advise everybody to do their own research on. And we're trying to help others by putting detailed research on the website, not the old just blind assurances, everything safe and effective, but actually the data from studies so people can make informed choices.

19:01Katie Miller:A lot's been said about the CDC and how HHS has sidelined medical professionals. What medical professionals or which doctors did you use to help guide you to the new updated vaccine schedule? How did that come to be? We consulted with medical professionals across all the agencies, including not only political appointees at CDC, but career vaccine safety experts at CDC. And those individuals at CDC, those scientists, one of them has been there for, I think, 25 years and was a senior vaccine safety scientist. They made comments in the report, and those comments are reflected in the final report.

19:47Katie Miller:I want to flip just to the dietary guidelines that you briefly talked about and how important that is. I've read a lot and a lot of praise for the dietary guidelines, but some pushback in terms of saying that you should not have processed sugar now going from age two to age 10 saying, is that really serious? Our kids can't have a birthday cake till age 10. What would be your response to saying that kids shouldn't have sugar now until 10? And do you find it to be realistic? We, you know, we make recommendations based upon health impacts. So different people will have different successes complying with that.

20:24You know, I've walked through the checkout counter with my kids in the shopping cart and having them reach for all that stuff that they put there. And I know how hard it is to, you know, to deny your kids that stuff when it's right in front of them. It's being forced on them all the time. We recognize that. But what we're telling parents is, here's what you, if you're really concerned about your child's house, that's what you ought to do. And, you know, people will comply as best they can. You know, sugar was not available prior to the industrial age. And now it's all around us. And we've gone to eating pounds of sugar, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds of sugar each American a year.

21:13And that's not healthy. In historical times, you would get sugar intermittently. A fruit tree would blossom and you'd find a bee's nest with honey in it and you could get sugar in your diet. And it was okay. The human metabolic system can process it and they can process it better when it's in the food. A processed sugar, there is no precedent for that. in our evolutionary history. It destroys our metabolic system. It feeds tumors. It just is awful for you.

21:53Katie Miller:Do you believe in the 80-20 rule? Tell me what that rule is. Okay, so it's like you do the best you can 80 % of the time. That's how Steve, your husband, decides which issues that we should go with. It's do you believe that you do the best you can 80 % of the time and then turn to blind eye like the 20%, right? So, for example, you're the young mother going through the checkout counter and you're like, my kids, as much as I'm home with them and I cook them a whole healthy meal, I try to stick to your very high limits now on protein. And you know what? But they want the cookie that they're going to give me at the counter.

22:26Katie Miller:Do you just say, OK, it's the 20 percent. I'm going to look the other way. I mean, you can make any excuse for doing it. And we all do. So I don't I don't I don't quantify how many times I fail aspirationally. but you know what we're telling people we're giving them an aspiration and then you comply with it the best you can was there any bit of controversy when you were writing the dietary guidelines or disagreement among the team on some of the guidelines because they're all very specific and i feel like some of you would want more things than others there was bloodshed on every recommendation.

23:02It was full hand-to-hand combat. We had - What's the most controversial one? I think saturated fats. There just wasn't good enough numbers. The science is not out there yet. There's all kinds of controversy about relationship between carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, in lipid production and whether lipids are actually causing cardiac arrest. There's science that challenges that. There's science that challenges everything. What we did is we created, you know, guardrails and interpreting that science as best we could. And we tried to be conservative and tell parents, you know, we're not mandating that you can't eat this or can't eat that, but here's what you should shoot for.

23:56Katie Miller:What's the biggest roadblock in trying to make America healthy again? I mean, the biggest roadblock is the power of vested interest, of the pharmaceutical cartel, and of the big food, and an economic system that through nobody's particular fault has rewarded very, very addictive foods. And, you know, a lot of that was deliberate. In the 1980s, I was peripherally involved in the tobacco cases. And during that period, the tobacco companies, the cigarette companies, were the richest companies, the most cash-rich companies in the world. And those companies saw the writing on the wall. They saw that there was regulatory headwinds.

24:49There was litigation. The consumers were turning against them. and they began to diversify and they bought food companies so that by 1993 the two biggest food companies in the world were Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds and they shifted thousands of scientists who were making whose job it was to make tobacco more addictive and cigarettes more addictive and they shifted them to food research to figure out ways to make food addictive and they We did that by adding sugar, by adding softeners, by adding all kinds of chemicals that essentially hydrate our brains and get us addicted to these products.

25:32The products don't have nutrients in them.

25:35Katie Miller:What's the worst product you could buy today? So you're always hungry. What's the worst product you could buy today, our food product? I think probably the thing people should really need to look out for is sugar drinks. Because that, the sugar has no barriers in your body. It goes, you know, immediate work doing bad things, subverting your metabolic system. What statistic that you've read since you've been HHS secretary keeps you up at night? I mean, I think 38 % of our teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic. And that, you know, also 77 % of American kids can no longer qualify for military service.

26:20That, I think, should disturb everybody.

26:23Katie Miller:What's the most fun you've had in this job? Every day in this job is fun. I love this job. I have fun with it every day because, you know, we're doing things that I have an incredible staff. I have the highest caliber people who have ever worked for this agency. Because of President Trump, we were able to recruit billionaires from the Silicon Valley who walked away from growing businesses and from millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars to come here for four years to change America. And we have the best leaders in AI here. Our department is going to lead all the other departments in implementing AI.