September 29, 2025 • 41 mins
Since we started this podcast, one member of the Kennedy family has been in the news most consistently. Trump’s Secretary of Health & Human Services, RFK Jr., has been the elephant in the room during any conversation we’ve had about the Kennedy family. Today, we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to chat with Julie Rovner, Chief Washington Correspondent for KFF Health News, about RFK and Trump’s much-covered “autism announcement” last week and RFK’s role in the anti-vax movement.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This week we're doing a slightly different kind of episode.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I mean, there's a rumor, and I don't know if
it's so or not that Cuba they don't have tailan
because they don't have the money to fit tile in
all and they have virtually no autism.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Okay, tell me about that one.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
And there are other parts of the world where they
don't have tailan, oh, where they don't have autism. That
tells you a lot. So I'd like to ask Bobby
to come up and say a few words. I hope
I didn't ruin his day, but that's the way I feel.
I've been very strong on the subject for a long time.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Today, the FDA will issue physicians notice about the risk
of a ceda metaphine during pregnancy and begin the process
to initiate a safety label change. AHHS will launch a
nationwide public service campaign to in foreign families and protect
public health. FDA are also recognized that ceda metaphine is
(00:56):
often the only tool for fevers in pain in pregnancy,
as other alternatives have well documented adverse facts.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I'm George Severis, I'm Lyra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about
RFK Junior and the latest Health Department claims about tailanol.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
We haven't really covered RFK Junior yet. Bobby Kennedy's son. Currently,
he's in the Trump administration. He's the Secretary of Health
and Human Services, where he oversees the CDC, the FDA,
and a variety of other health related agencies and offices.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
And since we started working on this show, he has
been the Kennedy most consistently in the news, so he's
pretty much the elephant in the room during any conversation
we have about the Kennedy family over the last few years.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Last week the long awaited announcement of his findings after
he pledged to find the cause of autism by September.
Here's our FK Junior and President Trump this past April.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
We are going to know by September. We've launched a
massive testing and research effort that's going to involve hundreds
of scientists from around the world. By September, we will
know what has caused as an epidemic and will be
able to elimit those exposures.
Speaker 6 (02:29):
So you think you're gonna have a pretty good idea,
we will know by September there will be no bigger
news conference and then so that's it if you can
come up with that answer where you stop taking something,
you stop eating something, or maybe it's a shot, but
something's causing it.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So not only the answer, but Trump is already promoting
the big press conference for the announcement.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
So how exactly did we end up here? Rfk Junior
spent his early career as an environmental lawyer, but he
has been a famous face in the anti vaxx movement
since the mid two thousands. It all started when his
son Connor, had severe enophylaxis from a peanut allergy, and
through Kennedy's own research, he speculated about a correlation between
the CDC's expanded vaccine schedule and the rise in allergies, autism, ADHD,
(03:19):
and other health issues. He has spent the last two
decades spreading the message that vaccines are one of the
root causes of the continued rise in the numbers of
autism diagnoses.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
In reality, two big categoric factors contribute to the rise
in autism cases in two thousand and seven, autism screening
was recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics as part
of regular checkups for children between eighteen to twenty four months.
Before then, it was only if the doctor decided to
do so. And then in twenty thirteen, the fifth edition
(03:52):
of the DSM combined four conditions autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder,
childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder into one autism
spectrum disorder. These changes had a huge impact on the numbers,
and just to note, we are constantly learning new information
about the autism.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Spectrum, but you wouldn't know that from listening to RFK Junior,
whose views have been very consistent for years. Earlier this year,
RFK Junior falsely described the latest cases as severe. In reality,
the majority of recent diagnoses are described as mild, and
in fact, the number of quote unquote profound cases has
largely stayed the same.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Today, we have Julie Robner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF
News and hosts of the podcast What the Health. She's
here to unpack RFK Junior's announcement and walk us through
his impact as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Julie, Welcome to the United States of Kennedy. Before we
get into it, I unfortunately will have to have you
repeat everything you just told us off air, which is
that you actually have. Other than having the great fortune
of covering RFK Junior's current tenure in the drub administration,
you have various other Kennedy connections as well that are
relevant of the podcast I do.
Speaker 7 (05:05):
I go back my entire life pretty much with the Kennedys.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy is the first news
event that I remember.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I was five.
Speaker 7 (05:13):
My dad actually worked in Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.
I also grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, which is not
too far from where the Shrivers lived, so I have
been over to their former little compound which is no
longer there anymore, and met the Shriver kids. And then,
of course I covered Capitol Hill for forty years, including
(05:34):
an awful lot of time spent with Ted Kennedy at
this senator. In fact, my favorite ever memories is after
they finished a passing Hippa in nineteen ninety six, he
turned to me after the parting press conference and he said,
whatever will you do with your time now that we're done,
and I said, Senator, I'm sure you'll think of something.
Maybe the only snappy comeback I've ever had in my
(05:55):
entire life.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Very proud of that. It's so funny Kennedy's pop up
everyone where they pop up in so many conversations where
I'm not expecting them to come up, so he gets
very personal and while it's also at the core of
like you said, it's a hippa, a huge monumental pieces
of American history and politics.
Speaker 7 (06:14):
My best claim to fame about the Kennedys is that
Senator Kennedy's dog, Splash knew me and used to come
up to me at press conferences and drop his very
disgusting tennis ball at my feet because he knew that
I was a dog person. So I guess the Kennedy
I was closest to with Splash.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Well, there we go.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Since we have you here, and since you have an
interest in the Kennedy's, I'm wondering before RFK Junior, what
was the legacy that other Kennedys had, specifically in the
health sector, as politicians and as people in government.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
Oh, my goodness, so many. If not for John F. Kennedy,
we wouldn't have medicare. That was pushed over the finish
line by Lyndon Johnson, but it was pushed in the
campaign by John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Robert F.
Speaker 7 (06:53):
Kennedy was obviously a huge champion for people in poverty
and that was a big part of his campaign. Ted
Kennedy books have been written about all of the things
that he did for healthcare. His achievements as the chairman
of what became the Health, Education, Labor and Pendants Committee
are legendary. His son, Patrick Kennedy helped push the legislation
(07:16):
to require parody in mental health and physical health. That
was a huge effort. We've had several Kennedys. We had
Kathleen Kennedy townson O. R. FK Junior, sister who was
the Lieutenant governor of Maryland where I live. You know
any number of Kennedys now who've been in Congress, mostly
in the House, and health has been sort of a
(07:36):
through line I think for all of the Kennedys who've
been in public office.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
So that brings us to RFK Junior. Then obviously he
breaks from the family tradition in many ways. Can you
sort of give us a brief history of his involvement
in the health sector and in the anti vax movement.
Because he's obviously not a doctor by training, he sort
of came into it via his own family experiences and
quote unquote doing his own research. So what is his
(08:03):
history and health.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
Well, he's a lawyer, and he came into it as
a lawyer, and he was a very prominent environmental lawyer
in the nineties, which is where I think he gets
his interest in pesticides and food additives and things that
are more environmental than health related. And I think in
the early two thousands someone basically brought him concerns about
(08:25):
the problems with vaccines and he just got into it.
So since the early two thousands, he's been sort of
one of the prominent anti vaccine crusaders. He's been involved
in a number of lawsuits, He's made a lot of money,
and he's headed this organization called Children's Health Defense, from
which he's also made a lot of money. He was
very active in fighting the COVID vaccine mandates.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
He's got a big.
Speaker 7 (08:47):
Lawsuit challenging Gardisle the anti cancer vaccine. So it's been
sort of his crusade really for the last twenty some years.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When you say he's made a lot of money, wouldn't
even settlements or raising money, No, in litigation.
Speaker 7 (09:03):
I mean he's made a lot of money in being
a lawyer and suing some of these companies. He's also
was paid a lot of money from Children's Health Defense.
So he's done very well basically from his work as
an anti vaccine crusader.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
And did he sort of become a leader in an
existing movement or was he truly behind it as the
you know, did he, for lack of a better term,
popularize it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I think he helped popularize it.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
I mean I've been covering the anti vax movement since
the mid nineteen nineties, and it's interesting that Kennedy as
a Kennedy and everyone would think as a Democrat, the
anti vaxers falling to the sort of far left and
far right. They're sort of the far left I call
the crunchy granola types. I mean that we would see
in the Pacific Northwestern in California who just didn't want
(09:49):
to put artificial anything into their children. And then also
the sort of very strict individualists, if you will, who
say you the government aren't going to tell me.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
What to do.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
So those have been sort of the two strands of
the anti vaxx movement, all along with the name Kennedy.
And he was already fairly prominent as an environmental lawyer.
It was easy for him to take this movement and
make it even bigger.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what changes have you seen since he took over
at the AHHS.
Speaker 7 (10:37):
Well, I spent a little time making a list because
I wanted to remind myself of all the things that
have happened in the last eight months, and there are
a lot of them, starting with downplaying the measles outbreak
in Texas. This is the largest measles outbreak we've seen
in the United States in a couple of decades at least.
And there are a lot of doctors who found his
behavior cringeworthy to use a phrase that they used, you know,
(11:00):
basically doubting the vaccines and talking about untested and unproven
treatments for measles, which can cause very serious complications and
does cause very serious complications. As Secretary, he cut off
funding for enormous swaths of research.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Part of that was.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
The administration wide cutting off funding to universities because of
their DEI policies. Some of it was about the research
in general. He canceled five hundred million dollars in research
on mRNA vaccines that was course the foundation for the
COVID vaccine. Scientists worried that it would also be the
(11:42):
foundation for a vaccine that we would need to fight
a future pandemic because it is much quicker to make
vaccines using the mRNA process, and also it's being looked
at as possibility to develop a canter vaccine, so that
was very upsetting to a lot of scientists. He promised
the current chairman of the Senate Help Committee, Bill Cassidy,
(12:04):
who is a doctor, that he would not mess with
the childhood vaccine schedule. He has indeed messed with the
childhood vaccine schedule. He fired all of the members of
the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replaced them with
vaccine doubters and skeptics and anti vax people. They met
for the first time just last week and made not huge,
(12:26):
but some major changes to vaccine recommendations that have created
more confusion, I think than anything else they have. Both
he as Secretary and then the rest of the administration
have basically cut the staffing of the Department of Health
and Human Services from about eighty thousand people to about
sixty thousand people through layoffs and early retirements, and basically
(12:49):
he's been trying to clean house. In August, he fired
his own handpicked head of the Senators for Disease Control
and Prevention because she testified to Congress that he told
her that she needed to approve in advance whatever recommendations
the Advisory Committee on Ammunization Practices would make her being
able to review the science first. She refused to do that,
(13:12):
she was eventually fired, and most of the senior scientific
staff at the CDC then resigned after she was fired.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And then, of course this.
Speaker 7 (13:21):
Week he was part of this big White House announcement
about autism where the President said, basically without offering any
scientific evidence, that taking tail and all in pregnancy is
a cause of autism, as well as President casts a
lot of doubt on vaccines. So it's been busy eight
months for everybody who covers the Department of Health and
(13:42):
Human Services.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
As with so much Trump related stuff. Part of the
issue is this bombarding of information so that you just
become confused and can't really tell what is a big
deal and what's not. What is simply an announcement that
has no actual bearing in our day to day lias
versus what is a policy change for the average person.
That just becomes very confusing. So along those lines, could
(14:05):
you maybe just walk us through this specific announcement, this
latest announcement which I don't know if you saw this
image that was flirting around, it was just a giant
Fox News image that just said autism announcement, which almost
is so decontextualized to become like comical. So what was
the big autism announcement?
Speaker 7 (14:23):
Well, of course the big autism announcement. This was they
had promised the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F.
Kennedy Junior and President Trump had promised that by September,
and it is now the end of September, they would
unveil the cause of autism and a treatment for autism,
which everyone who's been studying autism for decades says said
was unrealistic, if you will, but they plowed ahead anyway,
(14:46):
and so basically, you know, the President said that there's
a causal relationship between taking tail and all a cidamnifin
the generic. Most people take the generics true causal relationship
between cedamnifin and autism if it's taken in pregnancy. Even
the fact sheet that was put out the same day
by the Food and Drug Administration said there's no causal
(15:08):
relationship identified. Yet there's an association that women who took
thailanol and pregnancy are more likely to have children who
are autistic. But as many doctors point out, one of
the reasons you take tailan alan pregnancy is for a fever,
and one of the risk factors for autism is fever,
so it may well be the fever and not the
tilanol that causes it. There is a huge study out
(15:30):
of Scandinavia that looked at a couple of million moms
and babies and basically did not find a cause of relationship.
There was no new science that was unveiled in this
big announcement. The other part of this announcement was a
possible treatment, basically a drug that's phylinic acid, a vitamin
B nine, which is already prescribed to most pregnant women
(15:54):
because there's concern I see nodding going on, women do
take fullic acid in pregnancy. Anyway, there have been some
very small studies that suggest that perhaps there is promise
for some autistic children with this drug, but again the
work is very preliminary. The researchers who were doing the
work are worried. They don't want to overpromise. They were
(16:17):
very unhappy that basically the President said we have found
the treatment and this is it, because that is clearly
not the case yet could it be possibly? Much more
research needs to be done. So I can say that
I've been covering healthcare almost forty years now, I have
never seen a press conference like that, And I watched
(16:37):
all the President Trump's press conferences during COVID when he
talked about bleach and all kinds of things. This was
something new entirely.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yet the treatment aspect in this announcement also in April,
when they announced and said, you know, we're going to
have these answers in September almost felt like something Trump
threw in at the end our CAA junior seemed to
be coming in and he given himself the deadline of September,
which do you know where that came from? Or is
(17:06):
that a mystery?
Speaker 7 (17:08):
I don't know where the September came from. Obviously, you know,
autism is something and autism's relationship to vaccines is something
that Robert F.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Kennedy Junior has.
Speaker 7 (17:16):
Been talking about for years and years and years. And
President Trump also has a history with autism. He has
sort of danced around the vaccine skepticism area for a while.
But I think it probably wasn't that hard for Secretary
Kennedy to convince the President to go further than perhaps
the science would dictate.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, I was nodding along so much because this has
just brought me back to when I was pregnant and
you are bombarded with warnings and new rules and things
you'd never heard of before. And it's a shocking list
of things that you cannot have or you're warned against.
And the reason why the list is so is because
(18:01):
they don't have the information on a lot of these items.
We can't do test on pregnant women.
Speaker 7 (18:09):
Right, It's unethical to test a lot of these things,
So you get lots of these things that this has
not been tested in pregnant women. It is an ethical quandary.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
So I guess it just brings me to Trump's phrasing
of saying just don't take it, tough it out. What
is the danger there in telling pregnant women tough it
out when it comes to avoiding thailandol.
Speaker 7 (18:33):
Well, as I said earlier, it may be that taking
the tilanol is safer than what it is that you're
toughing out, particularly.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
If you have a high fever.
Speaker 7 (18:41):
I mean, even thailand All says if you're pregnant, consult
with your doctor. Problem is a lot of people don't
have doctors, even pregnant women don't have doctors. It's hard
to get a hold of your doctor. For the most part.
It's kind of casting off your responsibility as a public official,
as a public health official, to say just talk to
your doctor, because that's not always doable, and the idea
(19:03):
of public health is to sort of do the best
we can for the most we can. And I've heard
an enormous backlash this week, you know, from the administration
saying if anything bad happens, it's your fault. That this
is all individual. This is true of vaccines and of
the autism announcement, that basically it's up to you to
do your own research and make your own decisions. And
(19:24):
that's a real concern. It's a real concern to doctors
who've spent an awful lot of time talking about things
called shared decision making, getting experts to help weigh the
risks and the benefits. I think I said on our
podcast this week, you know, we've gone from over trusting
expertise to under trusting it and putting all the load
(19:46):
on individuals. And you shouldn't get your medical advice from
TikTok or from elected officials who don't have degrees. But
it's hard to find that middle part. And I think
what a lot of these things have done is just
left people confused and frightened, in many cases, uncertain what
to do.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, I think the declining trust in health institutions more
broadly is one of the bigger stories here, and I
want to talk a little more about that, but before
I do, just to kind of wrap up on the
announcement itself. As you mentioned, Tailand already warns that, of course,
you should not be taking sixteen thailand all a day.
If you are, or if you even if you're not pregnant,
(20:24):
it is still something you are putting in your body. Already,
you should be consulting your doctor if you're pregnant and
taking it, and this announcement is just basically reiterating that,
but a more extreme version of it. I mean, when
I think about the possible horrible announcements that they can make,
I mean, get on TV and say we're banning vaccines
across the board or something like. It's as the dust
(20:45):
has settled, I'm like, well, maybe when the grand scheme
of things, saying that Thailand all is dangerous is one
of the least harmful things that this administration has said.
So what, in your opinion is the actual material impact
of an announcement like this, Like, take making the theatrics aside,
just the craziness and weirdness of watching it aside. This
isn't some big policy change. It's basically a press conference
(21:09):
that is meant to relay a sensibility almost Well.
Speaker 7 (21:13):
I think you said it at the beginning of your question,
which is that this is part of the destruction of
trust in the medical community, in public health and expertise
in general. That's a theme of this administration.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Robert F.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
Kennedy Junior has been very very in front about saying,
you know, CDC is hurting people. The scientists don't know
what they're talking about. They all have conflicts of interest.
I mean, we've been hearing all of this and basically
what it's doing is leaving people uncertain where to turn
to resolve difficult issues in their lives and to resolve issues.
(21:47):
And frankly, experts have studied and they do know some
things about tailan all is not all that safe. It
can destroy your liver if you take too much of it,
or if you take them, don't take tailand all if
you're drinking tailan all alcohol don't go well together. Just
because something is over the counter doesn't mean it's super safe.
We know aspirin is not that safe either. All of
these medications, as you say, you're putting something in your body,
(22:10):
and they all have risks and benefits. The trick is
to take it only when the benefit outraighs the risk.
The confusion that I think is being sewn here and
the mistrust in scientific knowledge and medical knowledge I think
is really what this is.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Part and parcel of this is one of the most
vulnerable groups for this type of confusion. I used to say,
getting pregnant can be a gateway drug to so many
different medical conspiracies and health conspiracies because it just unlocks
this whole new level of concern and lack of information
(22:50):
while also throwing a lot of blame and guilt on
the individual, Like you were saying, and.
Speaker 7 (22:55):
When you have the baby, it doesn't get any better.
Both pregnant women and parents of infants and toddlers are
I think, extremely vulnerable and extremely vulnerable too, as you say,
being bombarded with information and uncertain what information to trust.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
I wanted to take us back to the autism spectrum
question because all of this is part of both for
RFK Junior and for as you said, large swaths of
both the right and the left, is part of an
obsession with the so called rise in autism cases. Can
(23:52):
you tell us a little bit about the panic surrounding
that and how the actual medical community itself talks about it.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (23:59):
Well, the reason for the rise in autism is not
so much because there is more autism. It's because there
are more things that are now being counted as autism
and more of it is being discovered. It used to
be we thought of autistic people as those who were
basically nonverbal and unable to take care of themselves. And now,
of course we know that autism is caused by dozens
(24:21):
of different things, most of them genetics, some of them environmental,
and that it is a spectrum that we call it
autism spectrum disorder, and that people who are higher up
on the spectrum are much higher functioning if you do
diagnose it early. There are things behavioral and other things
that you can do to help those children achieve even
(24:41):
more self sufficiency. There are lots of autistic people who
are doing amazing things. One of the things about autism
is that often you end up with prodigies. They end
up being math geniuses or music geniuses, or some other
kind of genius. That is not uncommon in the world
of autism spectrum disorder. So it is some that is
much more recognized, and that's why we're seeing the big increase.
(25:05):
It's probably not because of Thailand all or childhood vaccines.
One of the things we know is that it's not
because of timerisol, the mercury based vaccine preservative that is
no longer in vaccines and hasn't been for twenty years.
And yet we still see that the number of cases
of autism being diagnosed go up because we're recognizing it
more and because we're applying it to more types of neurodivergence.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
And if you were to ask RFK Junior, why do
you think there has been a rise in autism cases?
What would he say?
Speaker 7 (25:36):
He's been very firm that he thinks it's environmental, that
he thinks it's from I think vaccines and tilan all
and pesticides and ultra processed food. Yeah, various toxins. He's
very big on various toxins.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Something that I think is interesting about the anti VAXX
movement is the relationship between the people involved in the
movement and the media. I was actually thinking today as
I was reading about this topic that the first time
I ever heard of the anti vax movement was from
Jenny McCarthy, the actress and model on Chelsea Lately, Chelsea
Handler's old talk show. And I was young and had
(26:12):
never considered that there was or was not a relationship
between vaccines and autism. And she was promoting some kind
of book or promoting some sort of nonprofit or something,
and she was very articulate, like she was really forming
complete sentences that made sense to someone that did not
have scientific expertise, and it really didn't occur to me
to question it until I probably talked about it with
(26:34):
my parents where I became older and started doing research
or something. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I had
never considered that. So I'm wondering if you can talk
a little bit about the success of the pr campaign
for lack of a better word, around the anti vax movement.
Speaker 7 (26:49):
Yeah, Jennie McCarthy is such a good example. I mean,
it's somebody with a big megaphone. That's when we were
still talking about mercury preservatives and vaccines mostly, but same
thing RFK Junior. You know, you get the Kennedy name
and immediately people sit up and take notice. So whatever
it is that he was saying, people are going to
pay attention to, and that has helped, I think blossom
(27:11):
the anti VAXX movement and that this is true. I
mean I get with alf reporter, constant emails and press
releases and requests of people who are trying to get
visibility for their particular disease or ailment or whatever. I
could if I wanted to do nothing but write about
this or that or the other, because people want more
(27:32):
research into the thing that they have and that they
think there is not enough research into the pr machine
is a piece of how this works. And then you
end up they go to Capitol Hill and Congress puts
the sentence in a report for the funding of the
Department of Health and Human Services. It says, you will
please give this much money to lime disease or long
COVID or whatever. There actually is now an entire arm
(27:55):
of the National Institutes of Health that looks at alternative medicine,
and that was partly because people came to Congress and
convinced people in Congress that maybe we should actually look
at some of these things.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
So I wanted to talk a little bit more broadly
about the difficulty of effective public health communication for lack
of a better word. I think that as someone who
in the past has worked in media companies, not in
any kind of health section or anything, but I have
seen firsthand how sensationalist and alarmist stories about health and
about specifically scientific studies just do very well and have
(28:30):
a staying power in the culture. And I'm thinking about
even just basically harmless things like dark chocolate is good
for you. A glass of red wine is good for you.
There is a sort of recklessness, even among journalists that
are otherwise very sophisticated and very ethical, just frame health
information in ways that I think in retrospect can be
(28:51):
seen as irresponsible. And I think that during COVID this
sort of reached a breaking point where it was often
not clear just as a news reader, what was one
hundred percent confirmed or one hundred percent true versus something
that was still an ongoing scientific debate. What can people
do to make public health communication more effective and to
(29:16):
foster a public that is better equipped to think about
these things.
Speaker 7 (29:21):
Well, this has been basically my quest for the last figure.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yes, yeah, every.
Speaker 7 (29:27):
Time I talk to a public health professional, I mean
there is an entire branch of public health concerned only
with communication, with communicating to the public. I was disappointed
during COVID that a lot of these public health professionals
were unable to articulate things that I know they had
studied in public health school because I had studied them too. Again,
(29:48):
it's about communicating risks and benefits, how the scientific process works.
What we know, what we think we know, what we
might know, what we don't know, it is difficult. You
need to dumb it down if you will, not everybody
remembers what they learned in fifth grade science about the
scientific process and hypothesis and't testing and conclusions. Although it
(30:08):
would be good if we all went back and reviewed
some of the elementary school science that we got, and
I assume that they're still teaching this in elementary school science.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
How this works.
Speaker 7 (30:18):
I really do think that the biggest failing of COVID
was the inability of the health community to communicate understandably
to the public. And I think I underestimated how much
trouble that would get us into down the line, and
now we are down the line and we are in trouble.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah. I think to me one of the most challenging
things is being both firm enough about, you know, precautions
that the public should take while also allowing for the
fact that science is constantly evolving. You can't take on
this stereotypical liberal voter stance of you know, in this house,
we believe in science as though. That is a very
(30:57):
rigid thing, because then you're setting yourself up for failure
if you pretend you are more confident than you actually are.
But then if you don't express confidence, then that's bad too,
because then you don't want to just be going out
and being like, well, you know, it might be one thing,
it might be the other. Who knows.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
I don't know why it was so hard for public
health professionals to say, particularly at the beginning of COVID.
N ninety five masks are the best, but not everybody's
going to be able to get those. Surgical masks are
not as good as N ninety five masks, but they're
better than nothing. Cloth masks are not as good as
surgical masks, but covering your mouth with something is better
than nothing. Why they were not able to just say that,
(31:35):
rather than say talking about somef well, we don't want
to recommend, you know, N ninety five masks because there
are harn't enough and you know, health professionals need them,
and blah blah blah, and you know there's a muttering.
It's like, just say what you know, and that's what
you know. And then we did a lot of a
lot of studies, and you know, it turned out that masking,
probably putting masks on little kids didn't do that much,
(31:56):
but probably wearing N ninety five masks for a good while,
probably did save a lot of people. None of this
is perfect. This we were building a plan while we
were flying it. You can say that we're building a
plan while we're flying it.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
This is what we know right now.
Speaker 7 (32:12):
It might change tomorrow, but this is what we know
right now. And I don't know why they had so
much trouble, but I think they would have done themselves
a big favor by being a little more upfront with
their own sort of you know, how you talk about
these things to the public, rather than trying to just say,
we need to give advice, and this is the advice.
I think there was just so much of that and
(32:33):
people just weren't buying it. And now people say that
they were lied to. And I won't say that nobody
was lying, but I think most of the public health
officials were trying their best to communicate what they knew
at the time.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So looking forward now with RFK Secretary of Hell, what
do you see coming down the line in terms of
communication but also just in terms of what his goals are.
Speaker 7 (33:17):
It certainly seems pretty clear that his goals are to
undermine the vaccine availability. I had a story by one
of my former colleagues that I was touting today. The
next thing he's going to go after is the so
called Vaccine Court, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which I
covered when I was a baby reporter in the nineteen eighties.
The creation of it, which was basically to keep vaccines
(33:41):
being produced, because vaccine companies were saying, if they're going
to sue us into oblivion, we're just going to get
out of this business. It's not that profitable. We're going
to make other things that make us more money. And plus,
vaccines do have risks, and there are people who get
injured by vaccines. So basically this was a way to say, Okay,
we're going to collect this on all vaccines, and for
(34:01):
the people who can show that they have an injury
that's commensurate with a vaccine side effect, we're just going
to give them some money. That's essentially what it is,
and over the years it's needed some changes.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Mostly there's a huge backlog.
Speaker 7 (34:14):
There just aren't enough administrative law judges to actually give
people who are injured the compensation that they are due,
but it looks like Kennedy would like to take it
completely apart. We'll see, it was created by Congress. He's
done a lot of things that theoretically, if Congress had
raised his hand and said you can't do that, he
wouldn't have been able to do. But for the most part,
Congress is just kind of sitting back and letting all
(34:35):
of this happen. So, you know, I'll be interested to
see when Congress stands up and says, co equal branch
a government. Year, we created this program, you can't take
it apart.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Hasn't happened yet, Are you optimistic?
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I'm waiting to see.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Okay, not to get too conspiratorial, but you know, when
you see someone making these grand pronouncements in the highest
levels of a government, you know my mind goes to
is there money behind this? In some way? If a
different kind of his had was pushing some shady drug
or something, I'd say, Oh, I bet it's big pharma lobbying.
So I'm wondering for people who are anti vaxxer, for
(35:13):
people who have this sort of skepticism, are there larger
moneyed interests behind them?
Speaker 7 (35:18):
In some cases, yes, there are a lot of people
who make a lot of money from selling supplements and
unregulated things that they say can help your health that
have not been as they always say in the tiny print,
not been cleared by the FDA, or sometimes I'll say
it's been cleared by the FDA, but not approved by
the FDA, because that's kind of weasel words, because cleared
(35:38):
by the FDA just means that it's not been found
to be actively dangerous, as opposed to it's been found
to work. So yes, there are moneyed interests. There are
people making money from being anti vas and anti big
pharma and anti big medicine. But I don't think that
when RFK Junior says that everything is because people are conflicted.
I know people who work Itartment of Health and Human
(36:00):
Services who have very difficult jobs. They don't get paid
a ton of money. They do it because they believe
in the mission, and frankly, they could be making more
money if they were out working for big pharma. Have
there been people who've done the revolving door, particularly from
FDA to pharma. Absolutely, I'm not saying that every single
person is a saint, but I'm also saying that not
every single person is as conflicted as some of the
(36:22):
conspiracy theorists say they are, and that the conspiracy theorists
who are saying that it's all about big pharma and
big medicine, some of them have their own conflicts.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
We could just talk a brief general history of the
anti VAXX moment. We talked about rfk's role in it,
but just more generally.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Yeah, and I say it is a combination of people
who are anti being told what to do, so they
don't like vaccine mandates. And of course that's how public
health works, is that vaccines work best by creating what's
called herd immunity. That if you get enough people who
are vaccinated, then the people who can't be vaccinated, who
are too young or who are immune compromise, they are
(37:01):
protected because if there is a random case here or
there of a contagious disease, it won't spread because enough
people in the herd have been vaccinated. So they're the
libertarian side of this, that you don't tell me what
to do. And then there are the I don't want
to put anything artificial in my body. These are the
people who also like to drink raw milk, which can
(37:21):
be really dangerous there's a reason we've been pasteurizing milk
for one hundred and fifty years. It kills things that
can make you really sick. And this has been the
anti vaxx movement is basically the mixture of those two
sides of the people that don't want to be told
what to do and the people who do not believe
in modern medicine.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I was listening to Rachel Badard, the health writer who
sometimes writes for The New York Or. She was on
some podcasts, and this actually has made a click for
me a bit. She was saying that rfk's politics are
driven by an obsession with purity and contamination, and that
really unites his interest in climate change and global warming
with his interest in preventing toxins from getting into your body.
(38:02):
And of course those are two poles of the same impulse,
one of them, when my opinion, is pro social and
the other one is antisocial. But I think an obsession
with purity and contamination is both part of the right
wing libertarian type of mentality that you're describing and the
kind of left wing hippie health food.
Speaker 7 (38:20):
It's funny he's created a make America Healthy Again scorecard
on the HHS website, which I was looking at what
the headings are.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
And I mean, the other thing that Robert F.
Speaker 7 (38:29):
Kennedy Junior has done is he's taken things that are
fairly popular among a bipartisan group of people. We should
not have pesticides in food. That's a bad thing. Autism.
If we can figure out how we should prevent kids
from getting autism, vaccines should be safe. We probably should
revise our dietary guidelines. Ultra processed food is bad for you.
(38:54):
Having all these neon colored fruit loops is probably bad.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
For you, and you should take it out of Sarah.
Speaker 7 (39:00):
None of those things are particularly controversial unless you're the
pest side industry, of the food dye industry, or somebody
who's making money from that side of it. A lot
of the things that he talks about and that we
know he feels very strongly about are things that are
fairly universally popular. I think that's why Trump was so
interested in getting Robert F. Kennedy Junior on his side,
because he brings along a piece of a movement that
(39:22):
Trump didn't otherwise have.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Well. I think also it's like, yes, who would argue
against that? And I think that something that we have
collectively seen while doing this podcast is that people really
want the Kennedys to be right. And I just wonder
if you could speak on RFK Junior being a Kennedy's
impact on his ability to push forward on these goals
(39:48):
or continue to be a public figure even though he
has separated himself so much from the Kennedy family in
the Kennedy history.
Speaker 7 (39:56):
I would say, I think the biggest frustration are from
his own own family, his siblings, who are constantly saying, please,
don't listen to our brother. He's crazy. I mean, that's
literally what they are saying. It really is difficult, I
think for the family because you know, when I'm a
child of the sixties, so I grew up with Kennedy's everywhere,
(40:17):
and I understand sort of the allure and the immediate magnetism.
And I've known many, many members of the Kennedy family,
so you know, I get it, and the enormous popularity
and the belief. You know, I think even President Trump,
who was Democrat for most of his life, is fascinated
by the Kennedys. They're the closest that we have in
(40:38):
the United States to you know, American Royalty. Trump loves
the idea that he has his own Kennedy, so I
think that's been part of the drivers of this. But
as I say, I think the people who are most
frustrated are his relatives who don't believe in most of
what he's doing and keep trying to tell the public that.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Well, this has been really really great. Thank you for
making everything concise and understandable to someone with a very
passing knowledge of all this stuff. Really, I'll have to
go back and.
Speaker 7 (41:05):
Listen to the rest of this podcast because now I'm fascinated.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Right, Thank you so much. Of course, thank you. That's
it for this week's episode.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
And next week we're going back to regularly scheduled programming,
digging into the blood feud between RFK Senior Bobby Kennedy
and Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
United States of Kennedy is hosted by me Lyra Smith
and George Severes.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Research by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Original music by Josh Waitzapolski.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
Edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by Doug bain. Our
Executive producer is Jenna Cagele. United States of Kennedy is
a production of iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all things
Kennedy every week
This week we're doing a slightly different kind of episode.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I mean, there's a rumor, and I don't know if
it's so or not that Cuba they don't have tailan
because they don't have the money to fit tile in
all and they have virtually no autism.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Okay, tell me about that one.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
And there are other parts of the world where they
don't have tailan, oh, where they don't have autism. That
tells you a lot. So I'd like to ask Bobby
to come up and say a few words. I hope
I didn't ruin his day, but that's the way I feel.
I've been very strong on the subject for a long time.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Today, the FDA will issue physicians notice about the risk
of a ceda metaphine during pregnancy and begin the process
to initiate a safety label change. AHHS will launch a
nationwide public service campaign to in foreign families and protect
public health. FDA are also recognized that ceda metaphine is
(00:56):
often the only tool for fevers in pain in pregnancy,
as other alternatives have well documented adverse facts.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I'm George Severis, I'm Lyra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about
RFK Junior and the latest Health Department claims about tailanol.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
We haven't really covered RFK Junior yet. Bobby Kennedy's son. Currently,
he's in the Trump administration. He's the Secretary of Health
and Human Services, where he oversees the CDC, the FDA,
and a variety of other health related agencies and offices.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
And since we started working on this show, he has
been the Kennedy most consistently in the news, so he's
pretty much the elephant in the room during any conversation
we have about the Kennedy family over the last few years.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Last week the long awaited announcement of his findings after
he pledged to find the cause of autism by September.
Here's our FK Junior and President Trump this past April.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
We are going to know by September. We've launched a
massive testing and research effort that's going to involve hundreds
of scientists from around the world. By September, we will
know what has caused as an epidemic and will be
able to elimit those exposures.
Speaker 6 (02:29):
So you think you're gonna have a pretty good idea,
we will know by September there will be no bigger
news conference and then so that's it if you can
come up with that answer where you stop taking something,
you stop eating something, or maybe it's a shot, but
something's causing it.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So not only the answer, but Trump is already promoting
the big press conference for the announcement.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
So how exactly did we end up here? Rfk Junior
spent his early career as an environmental lawyer, but he
has been a famous face in the anti vaxx movement
since the mid two thousands. It all started when his
son Connor, had severe enophylaxis from a peanut allergy, and
through Kennedy's own research, he speculated about a correlation between
the CDC's expanded vaccine schedule and the rise in allergies, autism, ADHD,
(03:19):
and other health issues. He has spent the last two
decades spreading the message that vaccines are one of the
root causes of the continued rise in the numbers of
autism diagnoses.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
In reality, two big categoric factors contribute to the rise
in autism cases in two thousand and seven, autism screening
was recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics as part
of regular checkups for children between eighteen to twenty four months.
Before then, it was only if the doctor decided to
do so. And then in twenty thirteen, the fifth edition
(03:52):
of the DSM combined four conditions autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder,
childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder into one autism
spectrum disorder. These changes had a huge impact on the numbers,
and just to note, we are constantly learning new information
about the autism.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Spectrum, but you wouldn't know that from listening to RFK Junior,
whose views have been very consistent for years. Earlier this year,
RFK Junior falsely described the latest cases as severe. In reality,
the majority of recent diagnoses are described as mild, and
in fact, the number of quote unquote profound cases has
largely stayed the same.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Today, we have Julie Robner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF
News and hosts of the podcast What the Health. She's
here to unpack RFK Junior's announcement and walk us through
his impact as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Julie, Welcome to the United States of Kennedy. Before we
get into it, I unfortunately will have to have you
repeat everything you just told us off air, which is
that you actually have. Other than having the great fortune
of covering RFK Junior's current tenure in the drub administration,
you have various other Kennedy connections as well that are
relevant of the podcast I do.
Speaker 7 (05:05):
I go back my entire life pretty much with the Kennedys.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy is the first news
event that I remember.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I was five.
Speaker 7 (05:13):
My dad actually worked in Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.
I also grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, which is not
too far from where the Shrivers lived, so I have
been over to their former little compound which is no
longer there anymore, and met the Shriver kids. And then,
of course I covered Capitol Hill for forty years, including
(05:34):
an awful lot of time spent with Ted Kennedy at
this senator. In fact, my favorite ever memories is after
they finished a passing Hippa in nineteen ninety six, he
turned to me after the parting press conference and he said,
whatever will you do with your time now that we're done,
and I said, Senator, I'm sure you'll think of something.
Maybe the only snappy comeback I've ever had in my
(05:55):
entire life.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Very proud of that. It's so funny Kennedy's pop up
everyone where they pop up in so many conversations where
I'm not expecting them to come up, so he gets
very personal and while it's also at the core of
like you said, it's a hippa, a huge monumental pieces
of American history and politics.
Speaker 7 (06:14):
My best claim to fame about the Kennedys is that
Senator Kennedy's dog, Splash knew me and used to come
up to me at press conferences and drop his very
disgusting tennis ball at my feet because he knew that
I was a dog person. So I guess the Kennedy
I was closest to with Splash.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Well, there we go.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Since we have you here, and since you have an
interest in the Kennedy's, I'm wondering before RFK Junior, what
was the legacy that other Kennedys had, specifically in the
health sector, as politicians and as people in government.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
Oh, my goodness, so many. If not for John F. Kennedy,
we wouldn't have medicare. That was pushed over the finish
line by Lyndon Johnson, but it was pushed in the
campaign by John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Robert F.
Speaker 7 (06:53):
Kennedy was obviously a huge champion for people in poverty
and that was a big part of his campaign. Ted
Kennedy books have been written about all of the things
that he did for healthcare. His achievements as the chairman
of what became the Health, Education, Labor and Pendants Committee
are legendary. His son, Patrick Kennedy helped push the legislation
(07:16):
to require parody in mental health and physical health. That
was a huge effort. We've had several Kennedys. We had
Kathleen Kennedy townson O. R. FK Junior, sister who was
the Lieutenant governor of Maryland where I live. You know
any number of Kennedys now who've been in Congress, mostly
in the House, and health has been sort of a
(07:36):
through line I think for all of the Kennedys who've
been in public office.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
So that brings us to RFK Junior. Then obviously he
breaks from the family tradition in many ways. Can you
sort of give us a brief history of his involvement
in the health sector and in the anti vax movement.
Because he's obviously not a doctor by training, he sort
of came into it via his own family experiences and
quote unquote doing his own research. So what is his
(08:03):
history and health.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
Well, he's a lawyer, and he came into it as
a lawyer, and he was a very prominent environmental lawyer
in the nineties, which is where I think he gets
his interest in pesticides and food additives and things that
are more environmental than health related. And I think in
the early two thousands someone basically brought him concerns about
(08:25):
the problems with vaccines and he just got into it.
So since the early two thousands, he's been sort of
one of the prominent anti vaccine crusaders. He's been involved
in a number of lawsuits, He's made a lot of money,
and he's headed this organization called Children's Health Defense, from
which he's also made a lot of money. He was
very active in fighting the COVID vaccine mandates.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
He's got a big.
Speaker 7 (08:47):
Lawsuit challenging Gardisle the anti cancer vaccine. So it's been
sort of his crusade really for the last twenty some years.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When you say he's made a lot of money, wouldn't
even settlements or raising money, No, in litigation.
Speaker 7 (09:03):
I mean he's made a lot of money in being
a lawyer and suing some of these companies. He's also
was paid a lot of money from Children's Health Defense.
So he's done very well basically from his work as
an anti vaccine crusader.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
And did he sort of become a leader in an
existing movement or was he truly behind it as the
you know, did he, for lack of a better term,
popularize it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I think he helped popularize it.
Speaker 7 (09:28):
I mean I've been covering the anti vax movement since
the mid nineteen nineties, and it's interesting that Kennedy as
a Kennedy and everyone would think as a Democrat, the
anti vaxers falling to the sort of far left and
far right. They're sort of the far left I call
the crunchy granola types. I mean that we would see
in the Pacific Northwestern in California who just didn't want
(09:49):
to put artificial anything into their children. And then also
the sort of very strict individualists, if you will, who
say you the government aren't going to tell me.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
What to do.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
So those have been sort of the two strands of
the anti vaxx movement, all along with the name Kennedy.
And he was already fairly prominent as an environmental lawyer.
It was easy for him to take this movement and
make it even bigger.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
We're going to take a short break, stay with us,
and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what changes have you seen since he took over
at the AHHS.
Speaker 7 (10:37):
Well, I spent a little time making a list because
I wanted to remind myself of all the things that
have happened in the last eight months, and there are
a lot of them, starting with downplaying the measles outbreak
in Texas. This is the largest measles outbreak we've seen
in the United States in a couple of decades at least.
And there are a lot of doctors who found his
behavior cringeworthy to use a phrase that they used, you know,
(11:00):
basically doubting the vaccines and talking about untested and unproven
treatments for measles, which can cause very serious complications and
does cause very serious complications. As Secretary, he cut off
funding for enormous swaths of research.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Part of that was.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
The administration wide cutting off funding to universities because of
their DEI policies. Some of it was about the research
in general. He canceled five hundred million dollars in research
on mRNA vaccines that was course the foundation for the
COVID vaccine. Scientists worried that it would also be the
(11:42):
foundation for a vaccine that we would need to fight
a future pandemic because it is much quicker to make
vaccines using the mRNA process, and also it's being looked
at as possibility to develop a canter vaccine, so that
was very upsetting to a lot of scientists. He promised
the current chairman of the Senate Help Committee, Bill Cassidy,
(12:04):
who is a doctor, that he would not mess with
the childhood vaccine schedule. He has indeed messed with the
childhood vaccine schedule. He fired all of the members of
the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replaced them with
vaccine doubters and skeptics and anti vax people. They met
for the first time just last week and made not huge,
(12:26):
but some major changes to vaccine recommendations that have created
more confusion, I think than anything else they have. Both
he as Secretary and then the rest of the administration
have basically cut the staffing of the Department of Health
and Human Services from about eighty thousand people to about
sixty thousand people through layoffs and early retirements, and basically
(12:49):
he's been trying to clean house. In August, he fired
his own handpicked head of the Senators for Disease Control
and Prevention because she testified to Congress that he told
her that she needed to approve in advance whatever recommendations
the Advisory Committee on Ammunization Practices would make her being
able to review the science first. She refused to do that,
(13:12):
she was eventually fired, and most of the senior scientific
staff at the CDC then resigned after she was fired.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
And then, of course this.
Speaker 7 (13:21):
Week he was part of this big White House announcement
about autism where the President said, basically without offering any
scientific evidence, that taking tail and all in pregnancy is
a cause of autism, as well as President casts a
lot of doubt on vaccines. So it's been busy eight
months for everybody who covers the Department of Health and
(13:42):
Human Services.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
As with so much Trump related stuff. Part of the
issue is this bombarding of information so that you just
become confused and can't really tell what is a big
deal and what's not. What is simply an announcement that
has no actual bearing in our day to day lias
versus what is a policy change for the average person.
That just becomes very confusing. So along those lines, could
(14:05):
you maybe just walk us through this specific announcement, this
latest announcement which I don't know if you saw this
image that was flirting around, it was just a giant
Fox News image that just said autism announcement, which almost
is so decontextualized to become like comical. So what was
the big autism announcement?
Speaker 7 (14:23):
Well, of course the big autism announcement. This was they
had promised the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F.
Kennedy Junior and President Trump had promised that by September,
and it is now the end of September, they would
unveil the cause of autism and a treatment for autism,
which everyone who's been studying autism for decades says said
was unrealistic, if you will, but they plowed ahead anyway,
(14:46):
and so basically, you know, the President said that there's
a causal relationship between taking tail and all a cidamnifin
the generic. Most people take the generics true causal relationship
between cedamnifin and autism if it's taken in pregnancy. Even
the fact sheet that was put out the same day
by the Food and Drug Administration said there's no causal
(15:08):
relationship identified. Yet there's an association that women who took
thailanol and pregnancy are more likely to have children who
are autistic. But as many doctors point out, one of
the reasons you take tailan alan pregnancy is for a fever,
and one of the risk factors for autism is fever,
so it may well be the fever and not the
tilanol that causes it. There is a huge study out
(15:30):
of Scandinavia that looked at a couple of million moms
and babies and basically did not find a cause of relationship.
There was no new science that was unveiled in this
big announcement. The other part of this announcement was a
possible treatment, basically a drug that's phylinic acid, a vitamin
B nine, which is already prescribed to most pregnant women
(15:54):
because there's concern I see nodding going on, women do
take fullic acid in pregnancy. Anyway, there have been some
very small studies that suggest that perhaps there is promise
for some autistic children with this drug, but again the
work is very preliminary. The researchers who were doing the
work are worried. They don't want to overpromise. They were
(16:17):
very unhappy that basically the President said we have found
the treatment and this is it, because that is clearly
not the case yet could it be possibly? Much more
research needs to be done. So I can say that
I've been covering healthcare almost forty years now, I have
never seen a press conference like that, And I watched
(16:37):
all the President Trump's press conferences during COVID when he
talked about bleach and all kinds of things. This was
something new entirely.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yet the treatment aspect in this announcement also in April,
when they announced and said, you know, we're going to
have these answers in September almost felt like something Trump
threw in at the end our CAA junior seemed to
be coming in and he given himself the deadline of September,
which do you know where that came from? Or is
(17:06):
that a mystery?
Speaker 7 (17:08):
I don't know where the September came from. Obviously, you know,
autism is something and autism's relationship to vaccines is something
that Robert F.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Kennedy Junior has.
Speaker 7 (17:16):
Been talking about for years and years and years. And
President Trump also has a history with autism. He has
sort of danced around the vaccine skepticism area for a while.
But I think it probably wasn't that hard for Secretary
Kennedy to convince the President to go further than perhaps
the science would dictate.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, I was nodding along so much because this has
just brought me back to when I was pregnant and
you are bombarded with warnings and new rules and things
you'd never heard of before. And it's a shocking list
of things that you cannot have or you're warned against.
And the reason why the list is so is because
(18:01):
they don't have the information on a lot of these items.
We can't do test on pregnant women.
Speaker 7 (18:09):
Right, It's unethical to test a lot of these things,
So you get lots of these things that this has
not been tested in pregnant women. It is an ethical quandary.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
So I guess it just brings me to Trump's phrasing
of saying just don't take it, tough it out. What
is the danger there in telling pregnant women tough it
out when it comes to avoiding thailandol.
Speaker 7 (18:33):
Well, as I said earlier, it may be that taking
the tilanol is safer than what it is that you're
toughing out, particularly.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
If you have a high fever.
Speaker 7 (18:41):
I mean, even thailand All says if you're pregnant, consult
with your doctor. Problem is a lot of people don't
have doctors, even pregnant women don't have doctors. It's hard
to get a hold of your doctor. For the most part.
It's kind of casting off your responsibility as a public official,
as a public health official, to say just talk to
your doctor, because that's not always doable, and the idea
(19:03):
of public health is to sort of do the best
we can for the most we can. And I've heard
an enormous backlash this week, you know, from the administration
saying if anything bad happens, it's your fault. That this
is all individual. This is true of vaccines and of
the autism announcement, that basically it's up to you to
do your own research and make your own decisions. And
(19:24):
that's a real concern. It's a real concern to doctors
who've spent an awful lot of time talking about things
called shared decision making, getting experts to help weigh the
risks and the benefits. I think I said on our
podcast this week, you know, we've gone from over trusting
expertise to under trusting it and putting all the load
(19:46):
on individuals. And you shouldn't get your medical advice from
TikTok or from elected officials who don't have degrees. But
it's hard to find that middle part. And I think
what a lot of these things have done is just
left people confused and frightened, in many cases, uncertain what
to do.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, I think the declining trust in health institutions more
broadly is one of the bigger stories here, and I
want to talk a little more about that, but before
I do, just to kind of wrap up on the
announcement itself. As you mentioned, Tailand already warns that, of course,
you should not be taking sixteen thailand all a day.
If you are, or if you even if you're not pregnant,
(20:24):
it is still something you are putting in your body. Already,
you should be consulting your doctor if you're pregnant and
taking it, and this announcement is just basically reiterating that,
but a more extreme version of it. I mean, when
I think about the possible horrible announcements that they can make,
I mean, get on TV and say we're banning vaccines
across the board or something like. It's as the dust
(20:45):
has settled, I'm like, well, maybe when the grand scheme
of things, saying that Thailand all is dangerous is one
of the least harmful things that this administration has said.
So what, in your opinion is the actual material impact
of an announcement like this, Like, take making the theatrics aside,
just the craziness and weirdness of watching it aside. This
isn't some big policy change. It's basically a press conference
(21:09):
that is meant to relay a sensibility almost Well.
Speaker 7 (21:13):
I think you said it at the beginning of your question,
which is that this is part of the destruction of
trust in the medical community, in public health and expertise
in general. That's a theme of this administration.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Robert F.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
Kennedy Junior has been very very in front about saying,
you know, CDC is hurting people. The scientists don't know
what they're talking about. They all have conflicts of interest.
I mean, we've been hearing all of this and basically
what it's doing is leaving people uncertain where to turn
to resolve difficult issues in their lives and to resolve issues.
(21:47):
And frankly, experts have studied and they do know some
things about tailan all is not all that safe. It
can destroy your liver if you take too much of it,
or if you take them, don't take tailand all if
you're drinking tailan all alcohol don't go well together. Just
because something is over the counter doesn't mean it's super safe.
We know aspirin is not that safe either. All of
these medications, as you say, you're putting something in your body,
(22:10):
and they all have risks and benefits. The trick is
to take it only when the benefit outraighs the risk.
The confusion that I think is being sewn here and
the mistrust in scientific knowledge and medical knowledge I think
is really what this is.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Part and parcel of this is one of the most
vulnerable groups for this type of confusion. I used to say,
getting pregnant can be a gateway drug to so many
different medical conspiracies and health conspiracies because it just unlocks
this whole new level of concern and lack of information
(22:50):
while also throwing a lot of blame and guilt on
the individual, Like you were saying, and.
Speaker 7 (22:55):
When you have the baby, it doesn't get any better.
Both pregnant women and parents of infants and toddlers are
I think, extremely vulnerable and extremely vulnerable too, as you say,
being bombarded with information and uncertain what information to trust.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
I wanted to take us back to the autism spectrum
question because all of this is part of both for
RFK Junior and for as you said, large swaths of
both the right and the left, is part of an
obsession with the so called rise in autism cases. Can
(23:52):
you tell us a little bit about the panic surrounding
that and how the actual medical community itself talks about it.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (23:59):
Well, the reason for the rise in autism is not
so much because there is more autism. It's because there
are more things that are now being counted as autism
and more of it is being discovered. It used to
be we thought of autistic people as those who were
basically nonverbal and unable to take care of themselves. And now,
of course we know that autism is caused by dozens
(24:21):
of different things, most of them genetics, some of them environmental,
and that it is a spectrum that we call it
autism spectrum disorder, and that people who are higher up
on the spectrum are much higher functioning if you do
diagnose it early. There are things behavioral and other things
that you can do to help those children achieve even
(24:41):
more self sufficiency. There are lots of autistic people who
are doing amazing things. One of the things about autism
is that often you end up with prodigies. They end
up being math geniuses or music geniuses, or some other
kind of genius. That is not uncommon in the world
of autism spectrum disorder. So it is some that is
much more recognized, and that's why we're seeing the big increase.
(25:05):
It's probably not because of Thailand all or childhood vaccines.
One of the things we know is that it's not
because of timerisol, the mercury based vaccine preservative that is
no longer in vaccines and hasn't been for twenty years.
And yet we still see that the number of cases
of autism being diagnosed go up because we're recognizing it
more and because we're applying it to more types of neurodivergence.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
And if you were to ask RFK Junior, why do
you think there has been a rise in autism cases?
What would he say?
Speaker 7 (25:36):
He's been very firm that he thinks it's environmental, that
he thinks it's from I think vaccines and tilan all
and pesticides and ultra processed food. Yeah, various toxins. He's
very big on various toxins.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Something that I think is interesting about the anti VAXX
movement is the relationship between the people involved in the
movement and the media. I was actually thinking today as
I was reading about this topic that the first time
I ever heard of the anti vax movement was from
Jenny McCarthy, the actress and model on Chelsea Lately, Chelsea
Handler's old talk show. And I was young and had
(26:12):
never considered that there was or was not a relationship
between vaccines and autism. And she was promoting some kind
of book or promoting some sort of nonprofit or something,
and she was very articulate, like she was really forming
complete sentences that made sense to someone that did not
have scientific expertise, and it really didn't occur to me
to question it until I probably talked about it with
(26:34):
my parents where I became older and started doing research
or something. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I had
never considered that. So I'm wondering if you can talk
a little bit about the success of the pr campaign
for lack of a better word, around the anti vax movement.
Speaker 7 (26:49):
Yeah, Jennie McCarthy is such a good example. I mean,
it's somebody with a big megaphone. That's when we were
still talking about mercury preservatives and vaccines mostly, but same
thing RFK Junior. You know, you get the Kennedy name
and immediately people sit up and take notice. So whatever
it is that he was saying, people are going to
pay attention to, and that has helped, I think blossom
(27:11):
the anti VAXX movement and that this is true. I
mean I get with alf reporter, constant emails and press
releases and requests of people who are trying to get
visibility for their particular disease or ailment or whatever. I
could if I wanted to do nothing but write about
this or that or the other, because people want more
(27:32):
research into the thing that they have and that they
think there is not enough research into the pr machine
is a piece of how this works. And then you
end up they go to Capitol Hill and Congress puts
the sentence in a report for the funding of the
Department of Health and Human Services. It says, you will
please give this much money to lime disease or long
COVID or whatever. There actually is now an entire arm
(27:55):
of the National Institutes of Health that looks at alternative medicine,
and that was partly because people came to Congress and
convinced people in Congress that maybe we should actually look
at some of these things.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
So I wanted to talk a little bit more broadly
about the difficulty of effective public health communication for lack
of a better word. I think that as someone who
in the past has worked in media companies, not in
any kind of health section or anything, but I have
seen firsthand how sensationalist and alarmist stories about health and
about specifically scientific studies just do very well and have
(28:30):
a staying power in the culture. And I'm thinking about
even just basically harmless things like dark chocolate is good
for you. A glass of red wine is good for you.
There is a sort of recklessness, even among journalists that
are otherwise very sophisticated and very ethical, just frame health
information in ways that I think in retrospect can be
(28:51):
seen as irresponsible. And I think that during COVID this
sort of reached a breaking point where it was often
not clear just as a news reader, what was one
hundred percent confirmed or one hundred percent true versus something
that was still an ongoing scientific debate. What can people
do to make public health communication more effective and to
(29:16):
foster a public that is better equipped to think about
these things.
Speaker 7 (29:21):
Well, this has been basically my quest for the last figure.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yes, yeah, every.
Speaker 7 (29:27):
Time I talk to a public health professional, I mean
there is an entire branch of public health concerned only
with communication, with communicating to the public. I was disappointed
during COVID that a lot of these public health professionals
were unable to articulate things that I know they had
studied in public health school because I had studied them too. Again,
(29:48):
it's about communicating risks and benefits, how the scientific process works.
What we know, what we think we know, what we
might know, what we don't know, it is difficult. You
need to dumb it down if you will, not everybody
remembers what they learned in fifth grade science about the
scientific process and hypothesis and't testing and conclusions. Although it
(30:08):
would be good if we all went back and reviewed
some of the elementary school science that we got, and
I assume that they're still teaching this in elementary school science.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
How this works.
Speaker 7 (30:18):
I really do think that the biggest failing of COVID
was the inability of the health community to communicate understandably
to the public. And I think I underestimated how much
trouble that would get us into down the line, and
now we are down the line and we are in trouble.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah. I think to me one of the most challenging
things is being both firm enough about, you know, precautions
that the public should take while also allowing for the
fact that science is constantly evolving. You can't take on
this stereotypical liberal voter stance of you know, in this house,
we believe in science as though. That is a very
(30:57):
rigid thing, because then you're setting yourself up for failure
if you pretend you are more confident than you actually are.
But then if you don't express confidence, then that's bad too,
because then you don't want to just be going out
and being like, well, you know, it might be one thing,
it might be the other. Who knows.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
I don't know why it was so hard for public
health professionals to say, particularly at the beginning of COVID.
N ninety five masks are the best, but not everybody's
going to be able to get those. Surgical masks are
not as good as N ninety five masks, but they're
better than nothing. Cloth masks are not as good as
surgical masks, but covering your mouth with something is better
than nothing. Why they were not able to just say that,
(31:35):
rather than say talking about somef well, we don't want
to recommend, you know, N ninety five masks because there
are harn't enough and you know, health professionals need them,
and blah blah blah, and you know there's a muttering.
It's like, just say what you know, and that's what
you know. And then we did a lot of a
lot of studies, and you know, it turned out that masking,
probably putting masks on little kids didn't do that much,
(31:56):
but probably wearing N ninety five masks for a good while,
probably did save a lot of people. None of this
is perfect. This we were building a plan while we
were flying it. You can say that we're building a
plan while we're flying it.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
This is what we know right now.
Speaker 7 (32:12):
It might change tomorrow, but this is what we know
right now. And I don't know why they had so
much trouble, but I think they would have done themselves
a big favor by being a little more upfront with
their own sort of you know, how you talk about
these things to the public, rather than trying to just say,
we need to give advice, and this is the advice.
I think there was just so much of that and
(32:33):
people just weren't buying it. And now people say that
they were lied to. And I won't say that nobody
was lying, but I think most of the public health
officials were trying their best to communicate what they knew
at the time.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So looking forward now with RFK Secretary of Hell, what
do you see coming down the line in terms of
communication but also just in terms of what his goals are.
Speaker 7 (33:17):
It certainly seems pretty clear that his goals are to
undermine the vaccine availability. I had a story by one
of my former colleagues that I was touting today. The
next thing he's going to go after is the so
called Vaccine Court, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which I
covered when I was a baby reporter in the nineteen eighties.
The creation of it, which was basically to keep vaccines
(33:41):
being produced, because vaccine companies were saying, if they're going
to sue us into oblivion, we're just going to get
out of this business. It's not that profitable. We're going
to make other things that make us more money. And plus,
vaccines do have risks, and there are people who get
injured by vaccines. So basically this was a way to say, Okay,
we're going to collect this on all vaccines, and for
(34:01):
the people who can show that they have an injury
that's commensurate with a vaccine side effect, we're just going
to give them some money. That's essentially what it is,
and over the years it's needed some changes.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Mostly there's a huge backlog.
Speaker 7 (34:14):
There just aren't enough administrative law judges to actually give
people who are injured the compensation that they are due,
but it looks like Kennedy would like to take it
completely apart. We'll see, it was created by Congress. He's
done a lot of things that theoretically, if Congress had
raised his hand and said you can't do that, he
wouldn't have been able to do. But for the most part,
Congress is just kind of sitting back and letting all
(34:35):
of this happen. So, you know, I'll be interested to
see when Congress stands up and says, co equal branch
a government. Year, we created this program, you can't take
it apart.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Hasn't happened yet, Are you optimistic?
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I'm waiting to see.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Okay, not to get too conspiratorial, but you know, when
you see someone making these grand pronouncements in the highest
levels of a government, you know my mind goes to
is there money behind this? In some way? If a
different kind of his had was pushing some shady drug
or something, I'd say, Oh, I bet it's big pharma lobbying.
So I'm wondering for people who are anti vaxxer, for
(35:13):
people who have this sort of skepticism, are there larger
moneyed interests behind them?
Speaker 7 (35:18):
In some cases, yes, there are a lot of people
who make a lot of money from selling supplements and
unregulated things that they say can help your health that
have not been as they always say in the tiny print,
not been cleared by the FDA, or sometimes I'll say
it's been cleared by the FDA, but not approved by
the FDA, because that's kind of weasel words, because cleared
(35:38):
by the FDA just means that it's not been found
to be actively dangerous, as opposed to it's been found
to work. So yes, there are moneyed interests. There are
people making money from being anti vas and anti big
pharma and anti big medicine. But I don't think that
when RFK Junior says that everything is because people are conflicted.
I know people who work Itartment of Health and Human
(36:00):
Services who have very difficult jobs. They don't get paid
a ton of money. They do it because they believe
in the mission, and frankly, they could be making more
money if they were out working for big pharma. Have
there been people who've done the revolving door, particularly from
FDA to pharma. Absolutely, I'm not saying that every single
person is a saint, but I'm also saying that not
every single person is as conflicted as some of the
(36:22):
conspiracy theorists say they are, and that the conspiracy theorists
who are saying that it's all about big pharma and
big medicine, some of them have their own conflicts.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
We could just talk a brief general history of the
anti VAXX moment. We talked about rfk's role in it,
but just more generally.
Speaker 7 (36:40):
Yeah, and I say it is a combination of people
who are anti being told what to do, so they
don't like vaccine mandates. And of course that's how public
health works, is that vaccines work best by creating what's
called herd immunity. That if you get enough people who
are vaccinated, then the people who can't be vaccinated, who
are too young or who are immune compromise, they are
(37:01):
protected because if there is a random case here or
there of a contagious disease, it won't spread because enough
people in the herd have been vaccinated. So they're the
libertarian side of this, that you don't tell me what
to do. And then there are the I don't want
to put anything artificial in my body. These are the
people who also like to drink raw milk, which can
(37:21):
be really dangerous there's a reason we've been pasteurizing milk
for one hundred and fifty years. It kills things that
can make you really sick. And this has been the
anti vaxx movement is basically the mixture of those two
sides of the people that don't want to be told
what to do and the people who do not believe
in modern medicine.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
I was listening to Rachel Badard, the health writer who
sometimes writes for The New York Or. She was on
some podcasts, and this actually has made a click for
me a bit. She was saying that rfk's politics are
driven by an obsession with purity and contamination, and that
really unites his interest in climate change and global warming
with his interest in preventing toxins from getting into your body.
(38:02):
And of course those are two poles of the same impulse,
one of them, when my opinion, is pro social and
the other one is antisocial. But I think an obsession
with purity and contamination is both part of the right
wing libertarian type of mentality that you're describing and the
kind of left wing hippie health food.
Speaker 7 (38:20):
It's funny he's created a make America Healthy Again scorecard
on the HHS website, which I was looking at what
the headings are.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
And I mean, the other thing that Robert F.
Speaker 7 (38:29):
Kennedy Junior has done is he's taken things that are
fairly popular among a bipartisan group of people. We should
not have pesticides in food. That's a bad thing. Autism.
If we can figure out how we should prevent kids
from getting autism, vaccines should be safe. We probably should
revise our dietary guidelines. Ultra processed food is bad for you.
(38:54):
Having all these neon colored fruit loops is probably bad.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
For you, and you should take it out of Sarah.
Speaker 7 (39:00):
None of those things are particularly controversial unless you're the
pest side industry, of the food dye industry, or somebody
who's making money from that side of it. A lot
of the things that he talks about and that we
know he feels very strongly about are things that are
fairly universally popular. I think that's why Trump was so
interested in getting Robert F. Kennedy Junior on his side,
because he brings along a piece of a movement that
(39:22):
Trump didn't otherwise have.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Well. I think also it's like, yes, who would argue
against that? And I think that something that we have
collectively seen while doing this podcast is that people really
want the Kennedys to be right. And I just wonder
if you could speak on RFK Junior being a Kennedy's
impact on his ability to push forward on these goals
(39:48):
or continue to be a public figure even though he
has separated himself so much from the Kennedy family in
the Kennedy history.
Speaker 7 (39:56):
I would say, I think the biggest frustration are from
his own own family, his siblings, who are constantly saying, please,
don't listen to our brother. He's crazy. I mean, that's
literally what they are saying. It really is difficult, I
think for the family because you know, when I'm a
child of the sixties, so I grew up with Kennedy's everywhere,
(40:17):
and I understand sort of the allure and the immediate magnetism.
And I've known many, many members of the Kennedy family,
so you know, I get it, and the enormous popularity
and the belief. You know, I think even President Trump,
who was Democrat for most of his life, is fascinated
by the Kennedys. They're the closest that we have in
(40:38):
the United States to you know, American Royalty. Trump loves
the idea that he has his own Kennedy, so I
think that's been part of the drivers of this. But
as I say, I think the people who are most
frustrated are his relatives who don't believe in most of
what he's doing and keep trying to tell the public that.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Well, this has been really really great. Thank you for
making everything concise and understandable to someone with a very
passing knowledge of all this stuff. Really, I'll have to
go back and.
Speaker 7 (41:05):
Listen to the rest of this podcast because now I'm fascinated.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Right, Thank you so much. Of course, thank you. That's
it for this week's episode.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
And next week we're going back to regularly scheduled programming,
digging into the blood feud between RFK Senior Bobby Kennedy
and Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
United States of Kennedy is hosted by me Lyra Smith
and George Severes.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Research by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Original music by Josh Waitzapolski.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
Edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by Doug bain. Our
Executive producer is Jenna Cagele. United States of Kennedy is
a production of iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all things
Kennedy every week
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