Has RFK Jr declared a war on science?

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0:57The News Agents Hosts:The unmistakable voice of Robert F. Kennedy, otherwise known as America's health secretary. What on earth is he doing to the centre, the heartbeat of disease control in America by firing some of the top people there? And not only firing the top person there, A lot of others have resigned in protest. The crucial body of public health is in turmoil. Is Robert F. Kennedy curing it or making the disease worse? Welcome to the News Agents USA.

1:40It's John. It's Emily. And the Centers for Disease Control is an essential part of the health infrastructure of America. If there are immunisations, if there's a vaccine programme, AIDS, public health issues, it is the Centers for Disease Control that is absolutely essential to it. And if you think back to the kind of early days of the pandemic in Washington, it was the CDC who were there at the briefings every day with Donald Trump talking about how they were going to fight the pandemic. It brought them into the political crosshairs and they became part of the culture wars, a position that the CDC never wanted to be in.

2:26And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known vaccine sceptic who thinks that the CDC has massively overreached on its immunisation programmes, well, those culture wars have got a lot worse and came to a head at the end of last week.

2:42The News Agents Hosts:Yes, this was with the removal, the firing of Dr. Susan Menares. She was the CDC director. She is the CDC director because she's actually refusing to take herself out of the post. Why did she get fired? Because she disagreed with RFK's stance on vaccines. In other words, she still believes in the power of the vaccine to save American lives. And he felt that she was at odds with what he was trying to do. This has kicked off a massive backlash. I mean, thankfully, in many ways. We've got former leaders, nine former leaders of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, who have published an open letter that is not unafraid to criticise his policies, including his restriction of vaccines, his funding that he's pulled for research and the firing of thousands of health care workers.

3:35The News Agents Hosts:Why this matters now is it is not just an intellectual discussion about vaccination or anti-vaccination. It is a pragmatic approach he is taking to make it much, much harder for Americans to actually obtain vaccinations. In other words, maybe you could say, well, you know, he's anti-vax. He wants to explore things. He wants to open the door and ask questions that maybe were about what goes into vaccinations. And a lot of people think that there's plenty of intellectual room to sort of look at stuff. This is not just Covid. We should say this is childhood vaccination programmes in America. But he's gone much further than that.

4:16The News Agents Hosts:He's restricting access that Americans have to vaccinations for their children. In other words, you might find that you would go to your doctor and your doctor would say, I'm afraid I can no longer give you that vaccination or for your children because I will be crossing a law if I do. This is a direct, absolute impact of somebody's crazy thinking. And the problem that you've got at the moment is that there are various untested theories that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has about the impact of vaccines and how there are alternative treatments. and what he hasn't done is he hasn't given these people who work at the centers for disease control who've got a lifetime of experience in immunology in disease transmission and all the rest of it any of the scientific papers on which the kennedy theories are based and they're saying well hang on look okay if you say vaccines are dangerous and are bad for you and the mmr vaccine is a really terrible thing show me the scientific papers that have been peer-reviewed so that i know for a fact that this is based on science rather than prejudice he hasn't given them that and so these people say this is all a load of bollocks i'm not going to go along with something like this which is just your prejudice guiding health policy i spoke to i was with an american kid yesterday morning who says to me his parents are now worried will they get their flu shots this winter it has cast a fear across america about what is going to be happening in terms of availability of things like flu shots of shingles vaccines of whatever it happens to be childhood immunization i mean the things that we all take for granted that we just assume are part and parcel of having a baby seeing your kids start school all the kind of natural childhood jabs that stop your kids from getting smallpox and we and we've seen the impact of some of this texas has its worst measles outbreak for a decade and partly due to the skepticism that has grown up around mmr vaccines there's being a danger and a threat and all the rest of it and into this atmosphere you've got robert f kennedy jr who is not a doctor but who's got a lot of theories and a lot of ideas about what makes America safe and what makes America healthy.

6:41And he's implementing these things. And the CDC is in turmoil and being gutted simultaneously as a result.

6:50The News Agents Hosts:Yeah, he's also taking out money. I mean, he's taken out$500 million in grants and contracts in work on mRNA vaccines. So in other words, it is not just somebody coming in with a few kooky ideas and saying, oh, let's think about this and let's think about that. And, you know, to be fair, I think there are a lot of Americans who wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt or a little bit of benefit of a little bit of doubt. In other words, when he talked about the stuff that was going into American foodstuffs or when he was talking about America's obesity problem or when he was talking about, I don't know, like food coloring and stuff.

7:27The News Agents Hosts:I mean, a lot of this stuff is nonsense. But there were people who said, look around. Americans are not, you know, by nature, the healthiest group of people. Maybe it is time we had somebody or a conversation at least about what we're doing, what we're eating, how we're exercising, the health of the nation. The whole movement, as we know, is called Maha, Make America Healthy Again. And I think a lot of people would say, well, it is about time to look at this. But this is not in any way, as you say, a studied, evidence-based, scientific approach to what we should be doing better to make Americans more healthy.

8:00The News Agents Hosts:It's kind of a panic. Take fluoride out the water. Take vaccines off the shelf. Make measles go up tenfold in Texas. This is not rational thinking. It is not the movement of somebody who has actually taken the time to work through America's problems and their solutions. It's somebody who, as he has confessed, has a worm in his brain that's leading him to do some really odd things. And what I think is the really interesting wrinkle in all of this is where Donald Trump stands. Because the assumption is that this is getting on with Trump's work of implementing Trump's will and that they are absolutely side by side with each other.

8:40Trump posted on Truth Social, it's very important that the drug companies justify the success of their various COVID drugs. Many people think they're a miracle that saved millions of lives. Others disagree. With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer and I want it now. I've been shown information from Pfizer and others that's extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not? They go off to the next 100%. And so it goes on. He's not defending RFK Jr. It's so interesting, isn't it? God forbid. You've never ever said about a Trump tweet, oh, I don't know where he stands now.

9:14Bit of nuance in there.

9:15The News Agents Hosts:Bit of nuance. He's got a lot of exclamation marks, a lot of question marks, but without actually having a definite place to end up. Yeah. And we can't work out, I think it's fair to say, we can't work out if he is endorsing RFK, if he's trying to ask a completely different question of the drug companies, which stops him even addressing it, or if he's actually starting to get a little bit of a panic on because, as you've seen over recent days, he's a man who probably will come to depend on the health services of America in no small way over the coming weeks and months. And actually, quite nice to know that you've not taken all the vaccines out of the system.

9:52Yeah, there is one other group in all of this that I just think is worth considering because you talked Emily a moment ago about make America healthy again and so let's stop having such sweet drinks and let's stop having you know so many burgers and let's eat more healthily and let's have more authentic ingredients in food. Does anyone really say let's not have as many burgers? He has. Has he? Yeah he's said that part of the you know obesity disease in America is down to the way people are you know what they're eating and all the rest of it. Who wants Robert F Kennedy Jr to fail. The food industry does.

10:25Big Pharma does. All sorts of people with very, very powerful lobbies in America. If you're part of the fizzy drinks industry, if you're part of the fast food chains, you do not want to see these policies being implemented wholesale. You want to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr go and to have someone more to their liking in charge of health and human services. And at the moment, you can imagine that Donald Trump is getting it from a variety of people saying, yeah, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yeah, I know he's got a lot of good ideas, but some of what he's suggesting is very impractical.

11:00The News Agents Hosts:You know, normally that's a reason to sort of say, well, you know, push a bit harder. Do stand up to big pharma. Do stand up to big business. Make sure that you're getting value for money. Make sure that they're not, you know, pricing things out of the reach of normal people. This is, you You know, one of the big successes, I have to say, of the Biden administration was that he took off the brand names of, for example, the insulin jabs and medicines. And he managed to make medicines much cheaper for people. So I think taking your struggle to the big companies, I think it's something that we get backing from a lot of Americans.

11:31The News Agents Hosts:It's a sort of Bernie Sanders position, Elizabeth Warren position. But as you've said, it all comes from this weird place of one man's brain as opposed to any empirical evidence or work along the way. Yeah. One other thing over the weekend, I read various of the resignation letters and, you know, a number of them said. And the guy who was in charge, the director of the National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Disease, a guy called Dimitri Daskalakis, wrote a letter about why he was resigning. And I was with him 100 % all the way. And he said, I'm unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health.

12:16OK, fine. The recent change in the adult and children's immunisation schedule threatens the lives of the youngest Americans and pregnant people. Pregnant people. He couldn't say pregnant women. And I just kind of thought, I wonder whether with that tweet or with that resignation letter, you're making RFK juniors point that an awful lot of people would say, oh, my God, the CDC is woke. It deserves to be part of the culture wars if it can't call someone who is pregnant a woman. I read it. I thought, oh, that stands out.

12:47The News Agents Hosts:Well, this goes back, I suppose, you know, to the Covid years and the Fauci stuff, right? Because Fauci, who I think in sort of UK standards would have been our Chris Whitty, our Patrick Vallance, right? The people who stood either side of Boris Johnson and tried not to roll their eyes and who said, actually, this is where the science stands. This is what the public have to know. This is what we are telling you to save your lives. That was Fauci's role. And yet somehow he became the most vilified part, the most targeted part of Trump's administration, because whatever he said, mask wearing or closing down businesses or schools or whatever, got turned into woke nonsense.

13:33The News Agents Hosts:Oh, he's spouting woke nonsense. And he's in the capture of big business. That was the other thing that was labelled at him. He's been at the CDC too long. I mean, Fauci was right at the heart of countering the AIDS epidemic, actually, back in the sort of, you know, 1990s. He was there a long time. He knew his stuff. And yet he ended up being politicised through his need to keep sticking to the science as he understood it. The anti-science movement in America, to a lesser extent here, is just terrifying. I don't want to hear from experts. Well, frankly, if I've got something seriously wrong with me, I do want to hear from an expert rather than a bloke down the pub who tells me that what I need to do is to eat a certain type of mushroom because that will make me better.

14:18No, I want people who've studied the science of this.

14:21The News Agents Hosts:It's nearly 10 years since Michael Gove told Faisal Islam, our old colleague, people have had enough of experts. And in that one phrase, I think so much trust was lost. So much good work was undone. So much research was allowed to be sort of ripped up and thrown away. And he will probably tell you now, oh, I wasn't advocating it. I was just saying what people are thinking now. If we've had enough of experts, then presumably we're not going to just end up with a measles outbreak in Texas. We're going to end up somewhere along the line with 380 million unvaccinated Americans and whatever that means for the rest of the world.

15:03Well, let's speak now to Dr. Mandy Cohen. She was the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from July 2023 until Trump's second term started. And she was one of the co-authors of the New York Times op-ed that we were just describing. Dr. Cain, thank you so much for being with us on the News Agents USA. I suspect it didn't come easily to write an open op-ed to the New York Times. But presumably it was a mark of the concern you felt. It absolutely was. And the fact that nine former CDC directors were moved to write this, I think, is a warning, certainly to the United States, but I think to the world, that we are very concerned with the direction we are seeing, not just at the CDC, but at HHS.

15:53And last week, you likely have heard that the administration and Secretary Kennedy fired their own selected director of the CDC after our Congress confirmed them just three weeks before. And with that, we lost also four very senior leaders who also resigned when she was fired. So that is just showing that there is a lot of upheaval, but this has really been a pattern of attack on the institutions, on expertise, on scientific integrity, and we wanted to raise the alarm.

16:32The News Agents Hosts:You're talking about Dr. Susan Monares, who is the CDC director. Have you spoken to Dr. Monares? Do you know what she's going to do now? I have not spoken to her since everything happened last week. I have been in contact with the four long-term career officials who also resigned. Those were folks who had worked directly for me and I've known for quite some time. These are experts of the highest caliber, really some of the most incredible infectious disease experts and leaders in the world. They've led responses to Ebola, obviously to COVID. We had a lot of talent walk out the door and they said they walked out over the fact that they were being asked to sign off on decisions that were not based and grounded in science and data.

17:20And that is incredibly concerning.

17:21The News Agents Hosts:How vulnerable do you think America is right now? Look, the CDC has an important job to protect health and make sure the communities are safe, right? Their main job is to detect health threats. Those health threats could be infectious diseases like bird flu, or it could be chemicals like we saw in a big exposure in the United States when and we had some big wildfires and train derailments. So we have a wide ranging type of job that we're supposed to do at the CDC. And we never know when that next outbreak or health threat is going to come. And it could be two days from now, it could be two years from now.

18:00But the fact that we have lost talent and that I think we are headed in the wrong direction in terms of building trust, we're headed in the wrong direction in terms of making the investments needed to keep our country safe and healthy. I'm very concerned as well about US withdrawal from the global world. As you likely know, we've pulled out of many, many different relationships that we've had for decades that have allowed us to partner, but also to identify diseases and health threats before they can become a threat to any of us. So let me ask you this, where do you think Donald Trump stands on all of this because he posted on Truth Social a long sort of it wasn't a rant it was asking a lot of questions it was as though he was slightly worried as well by some of the stuff that RFK Jr was doing yeah I took that to say you know look the president it was under his leadership that the United States invested in you know Operation Warp Speed which is what we called our development of the COVID vaccines.

19:07And it was his administration, his leadership that put that investment in place to allow us to get vaccines as quickly as we did. And we are very proud of that accomplishment. I think so is the president. And so what you're seeing, I think, is Secretary Kennedy being not in alignment with the president of the United States. But we will see if the president will further weigh in here. I will say our Secretary Kennedy will be in front of Congress and be answering some hard questions tomorrow. And I know that they'll be thinking about what has happened with the CDC, but with vaccine policy overall.

19:46And I believe Senator Kennedy is out of step with where both parties in the United States are.

19:52The News Agents Hosts:Dr. Kern, can I just, on that point ask you to spell out on the vaccine policy what this means for ordinary Americans now can you ask your doctor for childhood inoculations can you get your vaccinations can you get your flu jabs it is is that going to become harder so what we are raising the alarm about are the the signs that we're seeing that things are moving in the right direction but the good news is right now the pediatric or the childhood vaccine schedule and access remains okay. But last week, Dr. Menara, the handpicked CDC director from the Trump administration, resigned because she said she did not want to rubber stamp new vaccine recommendations that she did not feel like were grounded in science.

20:37So we haven't seen anything new, but we are anticipating that there may be some additional changes coming in the next number of weeks. We were anticipating a meeting of our vaccine advisory committee in the United States. Secretary Kennedy fired all the members of that committee, reappointed them with folks in alignment with his ideology, which we have known about vaccines. And so I think this was all about warning. But today, you can go get your flu shot. And I'm encouraging folks to do that. Get your flu shot, get your COVID shot. We did see an action by our Food and Drug Administration to narrow and limit access to the COVID vaccine going forward.

21:17So we're already seeing some of the effects, but we are very concerned about these prelude steps that we normally would see ahead of a cold and flu season this winter. We see ominous signs, and that's why we're raising the alarm. Can I just ask you a slightly wider question, which is about Americans' attitude towards science and kind of thinking that there is something inherently suspicious about science and scientists and the conspiracy theories that arise and the culture wars that get started over it? Well, I think we're seeing a lack of trust in many institutions, science being one of them, but we're seeing that in a lack of trust of the media, of academia, of government.

22:04So I think we're seeing that in a lot of spaces. And I think that particularly, I'll take the criticism in public health, we were too slow to really communicate differently about building trust. I happen to run a particular state in the United States that was dominated by Republicans during the COVID pandemic. And I'm really proud that we were able to work across party lines and find solutions that were still grounded in science and evidence. But we were able to have conversations about the policy that stood on top of that. And I think that was a hard moment for the United States where folks felt like we weren't having a transparent and trusting conversation.

22:47But I feel like in the state of North Carolina that I had the pleasure of running the COVID response, pleasure may be the wrong word, the opportunity to run the COVID response. We were able to bridge that divide and trust actually went up in science, in the department, in the work that we're doing. So it is possible to do, but it was not seen everywhere during the pandemic. And we had work to do to rebuild after that. I was very pleased to see during my time at the CDC, we had some hard lessons to learn. I had some major criticisms of the CDC when I took over, and we worked very hard to correct those.

23:21And the good news, trust in the CDC went from its lower levels during the pandemic back to the levels it was before the pandemic. So we had rebuilt trust pretty quickly, actually, faster than I thought in the CDC. But what I'm seeing now is actually dividing us, not bringing us together and eroding trust.

23:41The News Agents Hosts:Dr. Cohn, thank you so much. Appreciate your time today on the News Agency USA. Thanks. Thank you very much indeed.

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