RFK Jr. Under Fire Following Vaccine Changes And CDC Shakeup

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This is Melissa.

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This This podcast was recorded at 1217 p.m.

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And I'm Mara Lyason, Senior National Political Correspondent.

We also have on the show today NPR health correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin joining us.

Welcome back to the show, Selena.

Thank you so much for having me.

And today we're going to be talking about the drama surrounding Health Secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., the federal health agencies he oversees, and the so-called Make America Healthy, again, known as Maha Movement.

So, Selena, why don't you set the stage for this Senate hearing late last week where Kennedy testified?

Yeah, so there have been a lot of really big big changes at HHS since Kennedy took over, and senators were looking for answers.

So just to recap some of the big changes, we have Kennedy overseeing a dramatic shrinking of the federal workforce at HHS.

So 20,000 staff are now no longer working at HHS.

That's about a quarter of the workforce.

Kennedy said that he wasn't going to fire this advisory panel that consults with CDC on vaccine policy.

And then he fired all 17 members of that panel and replaced them with his own handpicked roster of people who have a history of anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Also, he announced that he was canceling $500 million in mRNA research.

He said that the rules for who can get COVID-19 vaccines are changing this year without pointing to new evidence that would justify a change of position.

And, you you know, most recently there was this really crazy shakeup with leadership at CDC where the brand new CDC director was fired dramatically.

And then three of her top center directors resigned in protest.

And, you know, I think senators wanted to know what is going on over there.

Mostly Democrats.

I mean, Democrats really were gunning

to ask some tough questions and many have already called for Kennedy to resign.

But we heard lots of bipartisan skepticism about this approach to running HHS.

Yeah.

And so what were your big takeaways, Lena, from all this?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that the takeaway is that Republicans also had tough questions for Kennedy, not as tough as the Democrats who were calling for his resignation.

and really had a lot of tough questions for why he was departing from scientific and medical experts in so many ways.

But, you know, we did have two physicians on the Senate panel who are Republicans who said they were very concerned by Kennedy's moves, especially related to vaccines, and some other Republican senators who also did not take as friendly an approach as they had in previous hearings.

And so I don't know if this is a trend that is going to escalate or continue or what it means exactly for Kennedy's political future, but it was a notable change in tone, I would say.

Well, Mara, I mean, how likely is it, though, that Republican critics will do more than just voice their displeasure at a hearing?

I mean, do we actually expect them to echo Democrats in calling for Kennedy's resignation?

I think the short answer is no.

I think that what we've seen with the Republican Congress is that as long as Donald Trump supports somebody, they are not going to call for his resignation.

And I think the proof of this is Tom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, who is not not running again because he voted against Trump a couple of times.

If he's not even willing to call for Kennedy's resignation, certainly no one else will be because they're all worried about a primary challenge or having Donald Trump set the MAGA base against them.

So I think the answer is no.

I think the only thing that could change this politically is a gigantic public health disaster, some kind of a pandemic, when people start feeling the consequences of these changes

at HHS in their personal lives.

Yeah, and Selena, I mean, Kennedy has been focused pretty heavily on vaccines in this first several months of this new job for him.

But I do wonder how much this focus on vaccines is actually getting in the way of maybe other things Kennedy was hoping to accomplish in this job.

Do you have a sense of what he hasn't gotten to yet that maybe vaccines are overshadowing right now?

Yeah, I mean, I think that he would really like to be talking about the food supply and

getting kids off screens and exercising more.

The Maha strategy for making America's children healthy again is just out today, you know, and that lists a huge range of changes that HHS would like to make in terms of like how the country functions overall to reduce chronic diseases and make everybody healthy and all of these things, some of which, you know, kind of sound like things that we know, know, but it's ambitious, involves all sorts of agencies.

And, you know, that was kind of Kennedy's promise is that he would come in and shake things up.

But yeah, vaccines has been such an aggressive area of policymaking on Kennedy's part.

And he does have a position that is not widely held.

It is a very extreme view of vaccines as being suspect and of medical groups and regulators and researchers who say that vaccines are safe, that they are all bought out.

And the vaccine activity is, I think, taking away from that attention and those goals.

Yeah.

I mean, Mara, what do we know about how politically popular Kennedy's views on vaccines actually are?

Well, what we know is that they are popular among the MAGA base.

And the base is very, very important to Donald Trump.

But also know that among the population at large, his vaccine policies are very unpopular.

We have bipartisan majorities, big ones, who support requiring children to be vaccinated in order to attend school.

We also know that vaccine policy, according to the Wall Street Journal poll at least, is one of the few issues where voters actually prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans.

And that's very unusual these days because Democrats are at historic lows in their approval ratings.

So this is probably one of the issues where there is the biggest split between Republican base voters and the population at large.

Up until now, Donald Trump hasn't really cared about that.

In other words, he doesn't try to reach out to the broad population of people.

He wants to keep his base ginned up and very loyal.

But as I said before, if there is some kind of a public health emergency and HHS and the CDC are shown to be completely unable to deal with it, I think that could become a real political problem.

Well, I mean, regardless of whether there's a health emergency, I mean, I should say there might be also a political liability in the fact that Kennedy has promised that he would not take away vaccines from people who want them.

I mean, what could happen if people are seeking out vaccines and they just can't get them?

Well, that is a really interesting question.

How many of those people are in Donald Trump's base?

Yeah.

And I think that you would have to have a tremendous amount of media attention to those people, people who

might be under 65, but they're taking care of someone who's older than 65 and they can't get a vaccine even though they want it.

So yeah, that could be a potential problem.

But one of the things I would just caution people about is that a lot of things that would be thought of as political problems for previous presidents are just not for Donald Trump.

Yeah, one big question going into the fall is who is going to be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine specifically because the FDA has changed the rules about who has access to those vaccines.

And in the hearing, Kennedy, who was very combative during the whole hearing, but he got especially furious when people said that people who wanted vaccines for themselves or their children and were no longer able to get those vaccines.

were having the choice taken away from them.

He really didn't like that point being made, but it is true that people who want the COVID-19 vaccine are unable to get it.

We are hearing from people who are seeking to get vaccinated against COVID-19 this year and they're finding that they cannot get vaccinated.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we're going to take a quick break.

More in a moment.

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And we're back.

And Selena, as you mentioned, in the midst of this hearing, there has been all this upheaval at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Can you get us up to speed about what has been going on with leadership there at the agency?

Just to start, the first nominee to run the agency, Dave Weldon, former congressman, he was polled.

So then there was a new name put forward, Susan Menarez.

She's a microbiologist.

She's a longtime civil servant.

She was briefly acting director and then she was held up as the nominee.

And she had a bit of a tough confirmation process, but she got through.

She got in the job and immediately started clashing with Kennedy.

Over vaccines is what it sounds like the main issue was.

But in general, she was standing up for the other career scientists who were running several centers that Kennedy wanted to see gone.

She left after less than a month and it was a really messy process where HHS said she was gone and then she said through her attorneys that she hadn't resigned and would refuse to resign and only President Trump could fire her and then the White House said, okay, well, now we fired her.

And then three top center directors, which is like the top, top, top, top, top, resigned together in protest.

Yeah.

And it strikes me it's also exacerbating an existing issue, which is true in many agencies, of like large-scale cutbacks at the agency.

I mean, what do we, do we have a sense yet of what the overall impact on the public health system is of all this chaos, but also such deep cuts to the staffing there writ large?

Yeah, I don't know that we really yet have a full sense of what the impact of the dramatic staff cuts are going to be.

But I should note that although Kennedy pitched this restructuring, as he called it, as, you know, streamlining and getting rid of redundancy, there have have been many, many scientists and whole units that have been slashed, including units that were set up by statute, doctors for coal miners who monitor black lung and lead prevention experts for children and all of these teams, let alone, you know, teams that weren't intended to be cut, but ended up getting cut because of all of the Elon Musk-led incentives for people to leave their jobs and the early retirement incentives as well.

So, you know, I talked to somebody who works in a food safety lab who said that their staff was cut nearly in half and they were still getting the same number of samples.

These cuts are going to affect people in real ways.

I don't know that we've gotten the full strength of what that looks like yet.

Yeah.

And Mara, I mean, you mentioned that vaccine availability might end up being a political liability if let's say there's a public health emergency.

Could that be true of staffing changes as well?

You know, I think that for staffing changes to become a political issue, they'd have to be connected to something that people experience in their daily lives.

If they feel that

the fact that the CDC has been hollowed out or HHS has been hollowed out and that is why the response to a public health emergency or a pandemic has been lacking, sure, then that makes sense.

But I don't think you've seen the reaction yet against the tremendous staffing cuts that have been made all over the federal government.

So I would say it takes a big thing to get people's attention.

And I don't think that staffing cuts at the CDC are the thing that would actually get them to change their minds politically.

Yeah.

And Selena, I do want to talk about the position that some states have found themselves in in the middle of all these changes to vaccine policy.

And specifically, some states out west have banded together to respond to the CDC by creating an alliance.

Can you explain what's happening and like what the overall goal is for this?

So California, Oregon, and Washington launched a new West Coast Health Alliance last week.

And yeah, I think it really highlights that the country is split when it comes to what vaccine policy and access should look like.

And you know, the country's already split when it comes to what abortion access should look like and access to gender affirming care for youth.

The maps, I think, are going to look pretty similar when it comes to vaccine vaccine mandates and vaccine information and availability.

And we're starting to see that happen.

So, you know, you have this West Coast coalition.

They say that they're going to be a new source for accurate and reliable health information for people with the CDC's political appointees running the show more than career scientists, as has been the case historically.

And you have several East Coast states talking about doing something similar.

Then on the other side, you have Florida announcing that they're planning to move to get rid of all vaccine mandates for adults and children.

This is just one more

example of the incredible polarization that we're going through, where blue states and red states live in different universes.

They have different public health rules.

They have different approaches to immigrants.

They have different approaches to all sorts of things, public schooling.

I mean, just one thing after another, blue states and red states are like what?

Mars and Venus.

All right, let's leave it there for today.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Selena.

Thank you for having me.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

And I'm Mara Lyasson, Senior National Political Correspondent.

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