And, This Is Dr. Sanjay Gupta

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Speaker 13 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.
The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 13 So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer. The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 13 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 14 On this week's episode of Next Chapter, I, TT Jake, sit down with Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon for a conversation about change, identity, and the moment everything shifted.

Speaker 16 I mean, I don't take any credit for it. It's nothing I did

Speaker 16 special, you know, didn't knock down a few pegs and recognize it, but I just didn't put me first.

Speaker 17 I just put God first and He's carried me.

Speaker 15 Whether you're rebuilding, reimagining, or just trying to hold it together, this one will speak to you.

Speaker 15 Listen to the next chapter podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 14 New episodes drop weekly. Don't miss one of them.

Speaker 20 This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 18 This is Dr.

Speaker 21 Sanjay Gupta.

Speaker 22 Sanjay, it's great to have you.

Speaker 23 I appreciate the opportunity because, look, all of us are reflecting on whether this is, as it feels to many of us, one of the most sort of challenging and profoundly consequential moments with healthcare policy in our lifetime, or perhaps putting it more perspective more historically, even thinking back a little bit to Obamacare and their debates and the sort of fundamental shifts in health policy were taking shape there.

Speaker 27 So I thought I'd just open up, just ask you about the landscape, ask you about your perspective, particularly from the prism of not just a policy expert and a pundit, but also as a practitioner.

Speaker 27 What world are we living in as it relates to healthcare policy in the United States today?

Speaker 5 Well, you know, broadly speaking, I think one of the, and we've been talking, thinking about this a lot, is sort of what is the United States role when it comes to science, healthcare science, public health, all of that.

Speaker 5 I think for 80 some years, we were sort of the world leader, sort of post-World War II. That became part of our DNA in the United States and take great pride in it.

Speaker 5 We recruit the best scientists in the world. Some of the greatest scientific achievements over the last century have come from the United States.
And I think it's been something that

Speaker 5 certainly people in the scientific community, but I think the population at large really have rallied behind, taken great pride in.

Speaker 5 People coming from other countries for our medical care, new therapies coming out of the United States, all of that. And I think one of the,

Speaker 5 and I don't want to overstate this, but I think one of the worrisome things right now is, is that still the case? Do we still think that that's important?

Speaker 5 Kind of like maybe how we talked about my parents both worked in the auto industry. And I think there was a time period where people said, should we still be building cars in the United States?

Speaker 5 And my parents both ended up leaving the auto industry in 2001 because they were fearful that the industry was just going to change. It did not.

Speaker 5 Got bailed out, as you know, and all these things happened. And here we are today.
I think it sort of feels this has some of those same tones as that.

Speaker 5 Are we going to look back 20 years from now and say the United States is still the global leader when it comes to these things?

Speaker 5 That's the thing that I worry about sort of philosophically. Sort of more practically speaking,

Speaker 5 Governor, is something you talk about a lot as well. We're not a healthy country.
We spend $4.5 trillion on health care and we don't have a lot to show for it.

Speaker 5 In terms of outcomes, in terms of overall overall health, I think we saw that ripped off like a band-aid during the pandemic.

Speaker 5 People say, how could a country that spends that kind of money do so poorly with regard to patient outcomes? We walked in pretty unhealthy into that situation. So I think some of that needs to change.

Speaker 5 And frankly,

Speaker 5 most of that problem, I think, is in how we nourish ourselves. You know, the foods that we put into our body, the chemicals that we ingest.

Speaker 5 It's a problem. It's part of the reason I got into medical journalism in the first place.
That needs to change. And people have been saying that for a long time.

Speaker 5 You talk about it in California.

Speaker 5 First Lady Obama used to talk about that.

Speaker 5 Michael Bloomberg talked about that when he was mayor of New York. So it's not a new discussion, but I think it's one that needs to be had.

Speaker 22 So I want to get to both subjects because I think it's interesting as you start with the larger issue, as some of us, and I'm not putting words in your mouth, but this sort of this war on knowledge more broadly speaking, and certainly scientific expression is a part of that, this notion of just confidence in transparency, truth, trust.

Speaker 26 We can get to mis and disinformation and how that debate plays out differently through the lens,

Speaker 24 ideological lens on both sides of the political prism.

Speaker 27 But the interesting thing I think you underscored is just this trend line that's been decades and decades that's, I think, growing headline in some ways because of this Maha movement.

Speaker 29 And I think if there's one sort of reckoning, it's a recognition with RFK Jr.

Speaker 31 And we can get to

Speaker 24 the more controversial aspects of it.

Speaker 27 But this whole Maha movement is interesting to me.

Speaker 30 You brought up Obama, First Lady, Michelle Obama in the Let's Move campaign, her focus on issues of chronic disease, obesity, school lunches, which was exceptional at the time.

Speaker 21 And I was exceptionally engaged in that campaign. I think it was a 2010-ish plus or minus.

Speaker 7 But where are you in this Maha movement?

Speaker 27 Do you think it's a breakthrough in terms of consciousness, on a wellness frame, on a focus on some of these broader issues that have been under-resourced in terms of time and attention?

Speaker 5 That's a good question. I do think a lot more people are talking about this.

Speaker 5 I wish it didn't require

Speaker 5 sort of really demeaning certain populations of people to do it, but there's no question it has struck a nerve.

Speaker 5 And I hear people talking about it from circles that I had not heard people talking about this before, just in terms of really wanting to have some autonomy over their own health.

Speaker 5 So there's a lot of kernels of truth, I think, to what is happening out of the Maha movement.

Speaker 5 It is, I think, largely based on precautionary principle, which we can talk about more because I think there's other aspects of what is happening in healthcare that are the opposite of precautionary principle, this demand for more evidence and replication of evidence.

Speaker 5 And it's not just be careful. It's let's prove this to the nth degree before we make any movements.

Speaker 5 But with regard to ultra-processed foods, with regard to petroleum-based dyes, some of these petroleum-based dyes, Governor, should have probably never been approved. They have no nutritional value.

Speaker 5 They were purely aesthetic. There's many countries around the world that don't have them.
These food manufacturers can clearly make these products without them. I have kids.

Speaker 5 I've worried about this for a long time. So people have been talking about it, but no one got it done.
You did in California. And now it's starting to happen, I think, more at a national level.

Speaker 23 You know, what's interesting, Sajay, is we, you know, some of the things we led on, I appreciate you highlighting.

Speaker 23 I mean, and this has been a passion project for me going back to my mayor days when, and you referenced Mayor Bloomberg.

Speaker 24 He and I were very competitive in this space as mayors, he with a much larger platform in New York,

Speaker 23 I with a little smaller platform in San Francisco.

Speaker 29 But

Speaker 24 I've deeply been committed, as you have, in terms of all your work, focusing not on sick care, but health care, focusing

Speaker 24 on social determinants of health, which we'll talk about in a moment in wellness and prevention.

Speaker 11 But one of the things that is really came to the fore with me through a political lens was this notion of ultra-processed food, but specifically as relates to food dyes.

Speaker 29 And we did something that was referred to on the far right, which was the great irony and mocked.

Speaker 26 I mean, I can't tell you how many with respect to another news network there, three

Speaker 8 letter news network, mocked consistently called the Skittles Ban, because we were removing red dye and we were the first state to do that.

Speaker 27 Now it seems to be socialized in the political spectrum on the right

Speaker 11 as sort of endowed leadership from the Maha movement.

Speaker 11 But what was the movement towards all this?

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 25 there's chemicals aside, but additives.

Speaker 21 There's sort of obsession.

Speaker 11 Was it taste?

Speaker 7 Was it texture that we were after?

Speaker 8 Was it longevity, freshness?

Speaker 25 Why the U.S., not the EU?

Speaker 21 What was it? What is unique about the United States that we became overly indulgent in these additives and chemicals?

Speaker 5 I think it's more than one thing, but I do think a lot of it had to do with longevity initially, increasing shelf life of food.

Speaker 5 And that really got at a lot of additives, even going back to hydrogenated corn syrup versus sugar.

Speaker 5 You know, when you're adding these types of things in there, you're not only adding sweetness to some extent, but you're adding how moist the food is and how long it's going to last on a shelf.

Speaker 5 I think trying to, I remember, you know, former President Clinton used to talk about this. You can feed a lot of people a lot of calories for cheap if you're having these ultra-processed foods.

Speaker 5 You know, feed a family at McDonald's for, you know, 25 bucks, you know, if you have ultra-processed foods. So I think it, you know, if you increase shelf life, you can decrease costs.

Speaker 5 I do think the aesthetics of the food is not an issue to be minimized, though. It's very interesting.

Speaker 5 I don't know if you heard the story about what happened with Fruit Loops, I think, back about 11 years ago, 2014 timeframe, where they basically said, all right, let's remove some of these food dyes.

Speaker 5 There was a lot of pressure to remove the food dyes, and the fruit loops, as a result, were not as brightly colored. They were kind of bland color.

Speaker 5 If you go to Europe and go to a hotel or something, and you go to the breakfast buffet and you get fruit loops, they're bland colored fruit loops.

Speaker 5 They're the same fruit loops otherwise, but they just don't look look the same.

Speaker 5 And what they found when they did that in the United States was two things: one is that people didn't buy those blandly colored fruit loops, and two is they kind of got accused of the same thing that you were talking about-sort of nanny state, don't take away our brightly colored fruit loops.

Speaker 5 Same thing that Mayor Bloomberg got accused of when he wanted to not sell 16-ounce sodas anymore. The big golf.

Speaker 5 And so, it's really

Speaker 5 interesting, Governor, this balance between personal freedom and health. And

Speaker 5 what is interesting is that

Speaker 5 you can be sort of thinking the same thing and approach that in two completely different ways. One hand, I'm going to do a precautionary principle.

Speaker 5 We're not going to have food dyes, doesn't make sense, no nutritional value. Why would we do that? I kind of agree with that.
Again, as a health-conscious person myself, I like to eat right.

Speaker 5 I like to exercise every day. Why would I do something like that to my body? On the other hand, what is the level of evidence you need to have before making a decision?

Speaker 5 Prove to me that red dye number three is bad. Prove it.
Maybe some will say, why do you need to prove it? It causes cancer in animals and we should have never approved it anyways.

Speaker 5 But what is the level of evidence? And that's going to extend, I think, beyond food and additives to vaccines and therapeutics and other things. I think that's going to be the crux of the issue.

Speaker 23 And that's, I mean, and it's important on the precautionary frame and the precautionary principle.

Speaker 8 I mean, I think that's fundamentally, isn't it, the difference between the EU policy, where so many of these foods just simply never make the shelf and fundamental policy that's advanced in the united states that that that is exactly your friend i think todd wagner who's a friend of mine

Speaker 5 he talks about this a lot he started this organization food fight and you know when i spend time talking to these folks and reporting on this people will always say the same thing which is i go to europe i eat the same foods i eat pasta i do whatever and i feel great great i lose weight i all that now some of that may be that you're you're active more over there as well.

Speaker 5 There could be other things, but I think there's something definitely to that.

Speaker 5 And I think that so it's a little bit more than a precautionary principle. You have these large cohorts of the population that say,

Speaker 5 I have lived in both those worlds. I've eaten both these foods and I can feel the difference in my own body.
I think you can't ignore that.

Speaker 5 Again, with the backdrop that those petroleum-based diets don't have any nutritional value, you're not losing anything by stripping them out other than aesthetics, which, you know,

Speaker 5 may be important to people. People do like their brightly colored fruit loops, as it turns out.

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Speaker 33 so you talk about and you talk in the terms of precautionary principles sort of the the two ends of this and you referenced the issue of vaccines is that a reference to mRNA vaccines is that is it in what respect uh is a precautionary principle sort of the 180 degree uh flip side of that principle uh being abused in terms of or is it just more over on what more evidence do you need of something being bad or good?

Speaker 11 Is it the same thing? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think it's

Speaker 5 mRNA vaccines, but more widely, I think it's vaccines in general. And I think it's maybe even the response to things like a pandemic.
You know,

Speaker 5 when you're dealing with something that is novel. I mean, by the way,

Speaker 5 COVID was a novel disease.

Speaker 5 We had never experienced it before. And I know people said that a lot, novel virus, you heard that a lot.
But I mean, if you really sit and think about that, it's kind of extraordinary.

Speaker 5 I mean, as an adult, we don't get to experience novel things very often. Kids experience novel things all the time.
But when is the last time you, governor, experience something for the first time?

Speaker 5 Doesn't happen very often. So now you're dealing with something that is novel and you have to say, okay, look, our response isn't going to be exactly right.
Nothing's exactly right.

Speaker 5 Where are we going to tilt? What side are we going to err on?

Speaker 5 Are we going to err on precautionary principle or are we going to are we going to err on the side of let's sort of see how things go and figure it out as we go along? And I think public health,

Speaker 5 the training often is to sort of side with precautionary principle. It's like, let's be careful as we sort of sort this out.
How is this virus behaving? Who's it affecting?

Speaker 5 So I think mRNA vaccines were part of that. I mean, people, I think, understandably would say

Speaker 5 We need long-term data on these things before we start, you know, releasing them. I think that's a really fair sort of thing to say.

Speaker 5 But you realize that in the middle of a pandemic, to get long-term data means you have to wait long-term. Are you going to wait five years, 10 years?

Speaker 5 What does long-term mean? If it's for a kid, is it 80 years?

Speaker 5 What does it mean in terms of how long you're willing to wait?

Speaker 5 What struck me, and again, this is finding the balance between precautionary principle and evidence, is that We knew that for vaccines, the vast majority of the time, greater than 90% of the time, if side effects were to occur, they would occur within the first 68 days.

Speaker 5 That was the number. So just over two months.
So then the idea that the FDA would say, well, let's wait three months.

Speaker 5 Let's just, let's try and cover as many possible side effects that have come from this as possible before we give emergency use authorization.

Speaker 5 That is an example, I think, of policy that you have to sort of think about in the throes of something like this.

Speaker 5 It is still precautionary because we don't know the long-term data. On the other hand, you're using the best evidence that we do have in terms of what history has taught us.

Speaker 5 And I think, you know, I know it's been a sort of cluster since that, but I think at the time, to me as a reporter, medical reporter, and as a doctor, but also as a dad, that made sense.

Speaker 5 Yeah, if the side effects are going to occur, they usually occur within two and a half months.

Speaker 5 Let's keep a close eye on this thing, watch it like a hawk,

Speaker 5 wait even longer than that. And at that point, if things look good, then I'll go ahead and provide an EUA for it.

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 21 it's interesting.

Speaker 22 It continues to this day.

Speaker 30 I mean, obviously, at the state level, we saw the Surgeon General of Florida come out and recommend against mRNA vaccines.

Speaker 24 Obviously, the president has spoken from every side on this issue. I mean, considering he, through Operation Warp Speed, was the one advancing the platform and the technology.

Speaker 23 But obviously, the new Health and Human Service Secretary has been very critical and has been prone, arguably, to some sort of wild-eyed theories around DNA issues related to

Speaker 32 the

Speaker 26 mRNA vaccine and concerns around DNA, concerns obviously around its safety

Speaker 32 and

Speaker 23 the side effects.

Speaker 22 Where are you now in terms of just your concerns?

Speaker 8 mRNA is not just for COVID vaccine, right?

Speaker 29 It's also used for other vaccines.

Speaker 5 Used for other vaccines and used for other therapies entirely, including cancer therapies.

Speaker 5 There are clinical trials now trying to use these types of platforms, mRNA platforms, for very difficult to treat cancers, including pancreatic cancer, which we don't have great, great answers for.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 5 I think I'm pretty practical on this. I think where we are now in 2025 versus certainly when these vaccines got approved, we're in a different place, meaning that

Speaker 5 even though the uptake of vaccines has gone way down, most people did get the initial series of vaccines. And we know that they can, especially for young people, they can provide more durable relief.

Speaker 5 There hasn't, you know, after the initial, what they call ancestral strains of COVID before Omicron. I think these still provide pretty good

Speaker 5 protection, especially for young people whose immune systems really respond to them.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 I still think, you know,

Speaker 5 I I said this before, I think this was one of the great

Speaker 5 scientific achievements of my time as a human being.

Speaker 5 I think, you know, when textbooks are written about scientific achievements, the idea that they were able to create a vaccine essentially in nine months and be able to, you know, protect so many people, there's a lot of people who think they don't work.

Speaker 5 They do work.

Speaker 5 I mean, if you looked at the data, California or the country as a whole, who was in the hospital during the huge sort of swings and COVID, it was primarily people who were not vaccinated.

Speaker 5 So it was helping protect against illness and death.

Speaker 5 What I think was unfortunate, frankly, and this was a communications problem, was that they seemed to also intimate that it would protect you from getting COVID at all, from carrying it.

Speaker 5 And there was not great evidence behind that. And, you know, we reported as such that

Speaker 5 you don't have great evidence that shows that.

Speaker 5 When you have a vaccine that's protecting against illness, it's usually protecting in your lower respiratory, in your lungs, so you're not getting that really, really sort of a deep illness.

Speaker 5 But you might still have it in your mucosa, in your in your mouth, in your nose, in your upper airway. So, you could potentially still be carrying it and still potentially spread it.

Speaker 5 That was an, I think, a communications error. And I think, frankly, Governor, I think it led to a lot of distrust overall of these mRNA vaccines.
You said, you said I couldn't get COVID if I got this.

Speaker 5 Well, I got COVID and I spread it. So, what is this? Is this a vaccine or is it not a vaccine?

Speaker 5 That was a problem.

Speaker 25 And do you, I mean, are we being

Speaker 23 oversensitive, hyperbolic as it relates to how now this is manifested with the new recommendations that for pregnant women and for children, they shouldn't even be getting these boosters on COVID?

Speaker 27 Is that overstated or is that a more targeted approach? Do you think it's rational?

Speaker 29 We can talk about how that was done without the CDC, an advisory committee that usually advises in that terms of recommendation.

Speaker 24 But the outcome ultimately of that decision, where are you on that?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, first of all, you know, with regard to the CDC and expertise, I mean, you know, it amazed me when I watched people like Tom Friedan during Ebola or Richard Besser during H1N1 do their briefings in front of the CDC.

Speaker 5 And they would say, behind us, we have 4,000 of the smartest, most hardworking scientists in the world.

Speaker 5 They are so good that other infectious disease organizations in other countries model their organizations after us, even calling their organizations the CDC.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 that was a source of great pride, I think, for people in the public health world, myself included. I think where I am now at this point in 2025 is, first of all, I think what

Speaker 5 Secretary Kennedy has said versus what is reality

Speaker 5 is different.

Speaker 5 There's daylight between those two things. So he basically said, no more boosters for kids, basically, no more shots.

Speaker 5 Even now on the CDC's website, that's not what it says. It says it should be a shared clinical decision between patient and provider.

Speaker 5 So for kids, I think that makes sense. I mean, if your kid has asthma, do you want to get your kid a COVID shot? How bad is the asthma? How many times do they require an inhaler?

Speaker 5 Do they have diabetes? Do they require insulin? You know, these are, there's nuance to that decision.

Speaker 5 And I think, you know, the general approach has always been instead of trying to stratify all this by risk, which can be difficult as a country to do, let's just recommend the vaccine.

Speaker 5 I think what they're saying is, let's do risk stratification and let's put it at the hands of the providers, of the doctors, you know, for these kids. I think that makes sense.

Speaker 5 You know, if your kid is otherwise healthy, they've had their primary series, which most kids have had. We haven't had new variants that are worrisome for the time being.

Speaker 5 I think that that makes sense. Pregnant women, I would put into a different category.
I mean, the thing about pregnancy is that when you're pregnant, when someone is pregnant,

Speaker 5 their immune system is compromised intentionally. It's the way the body works.
You don't want to reject this new body inside your body, inside a woman's body. So the idea that

Speaker 5 you know you would be more vulnerable to infections while pregnant is real.

Speaker 5 In fact,

Speaker 5 you know, the FDA commissioner wrote before these new recommendations came out, he listed pregnancy as a high-risk condition for COVID.

Speaker 5 And then a couple of days later said pregnant women don't need it. I mean, if people's heads were spinning, I would understand why.

Speaker 5 The second thing about pregnant women is that if they get vaccinated, they can actually pass on some of the antibodies to their child.

Speaker 5 So for the first six months of life, that child may have protection.

Speaker 5 And they're very, young kids like that are very, very vulnerable to covet and some of the rates of severe illness they approximate what older adults have so very young very old both can get very sick but young young young kids under the age of six months can't get a vaccine so mom can provide protection but now they're sort of recommending against that as well i don't i don't think it'll stick I think most infectious disease doctors, you know, if you go to your doctor as a pregnant woman, will say, hey, look, here's the benefits.

Speaker 5 You're immune compromised as a result of pregnancy, and you can help protect your child after they are born. I think most people will, you know, at least pay attention to that.

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Speaker 24 As it code read

Speaker 22 what's happening with vaccines generally,

Speaker 8 the sort of growing anxiety around vaccine.

Speaker 22 I was listening to your podcast recently just about

Speaker 29 people expressing concern.

Speaker 22 They're getting so many shots.

Speaker 23 A young child, newborn, and all of a sudden they're getting four or five shots.

Speaker 23 20 years ago, they may have gotten less shots, but you described a very different construct as it relates to antigens and proteins and dose,

Speaker 22 which was fascinating to me and

Speaker 24 obviously calmed, I think, the nerves of those who were inquiring.

Speaker 29 But talk to me more broadly about the state of vaccines, your anxiety,

Speaker 31 and push back against some of this vaccine skepticism that's out there.

Speaker 5 Well, with regard to the, you know, you hear these crazy numbers, you know, 72 vaccines and all that. First of all, those are just made-up numbers.

Speaker 5 It's weird to me, Governor. There's no accountability for people saying stuff that's just absolutely not true.
I hope people, you know,

Speaker 5 they always say, do your own research. I hope people do their own research with regard to some of this.
So, yeah, we vaccinate against more diseases than we used to when you and I were kids.

Speaker 5 We're around the same age.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 what you're referring to is this something known as the antigenic load, which is really what scientists pay attention to. How much of a sort of load of antigens are we giving to the body?

Speaker 5 And what you find is that nowadays, compared to days when we are still vaccinating against things like smallpox, for example, the load is much, much lower, exponentially lower than we used to give.

Speaker 5 Even though there's more vaccines, vaccine technology has gotten better.

Speaker 5 They use adjuvants so you don't have to give as much of the overall, whether it be live virus or anything else, as we used to. So we don't

Speaker 5 sort of cause the immune system to react nearly as much today as we used to in the past because of that anagenic load. So, you know, numbers of shots and all that,

Speaker 5 look, again, as a dad, I don't like seeing my kids get shots. I get that.
I understand that.

Speaker 5 But in terms of what it's actually doing to the body.

Speaker 5 compared to what we used to do to the body at a time when, by the way, autism was a much lower rate. So we used to give a much bigger antigenic load, had lower autism rates.

Speaker 5 Now we have a much lower antigenic load, and we have higher autism rates. Make of that what you may.

Speaker 5 That's the data. That's the facts.
And so

Speaker 5 I don't know that I would call it code red, but I think that this

Speaker 5 the argument against, I think, what is a very, very effective preventative strategy gaining a lot of steam.

Speaker 5 And I think people are becoming increasingly, increasingly concerned about vaccines and hesitation.

Speaker 7 What did you make?

Speaker 23 I mean, you were out there in Texas, this measles outbreak. I mean, and, you know, you had folks arguing for more.

Speaker 8 And look, I'm not belittling it, but it was interesting to me. Cod liver, vitamin A as the solution, not vaccines.

Speaker 23 I was reading in different sources that, you know, a double-digit percentage of people that, you know,

Speaker 8 had measles ended up in the emergency rooms.

Speaker 33 And people are still arguing for heavy loads of vitamin A.

Speaker 26 I mean, give me a sense of, you know, the on-the-ground truth seeking that you did.

Speaker 8 And, you know, how does that play in, sort of a modern flashpoint with this ideological movement and the practical realities on the ground?

Speaker 5 I think for the

Speaker 5 physicians and nurses and everybody who's caring for patients there, it was incredibly frustrating for them.

Speaker 5 I mean, you're talking about vaccine preventable disease. We essentially have eliminated measles in this country.

Speaker 5 I think when we say frustrating, it's like, how are we going to make big swings at big, important things evolutionarily in science if we can't get the little things right?

Speaker 5 It's dying of measles, kids even getting sick of measles, being hospitalized with measles. It doesn't need to happen.
It's a travesty.

Speaker 5 And I think most of the people, frankly, that we spoke to, and not just people in the medical community, but we spent a lot of time talking to citizens, just going around taking the temperature.

Speaker 5 I think there was a lot of frustration. But at the same time, they're being assaulted with all sorts of information that is not accurate.

Speaker 5 This seemed to have started in a small community, a Mennonite community. And it's really interesting, there's nothing in the religious doctrine that says they shouldn't take measles vaccine.

Speaker 5 What happens, as we learned, as you may know, governor, is that these very insular communities, they don't get a lot of outside information often.

Speaker 5 So they may have somebody in the community whose child developed a febrile seizure or something. I think that's what happened here after a vaccine.
That can happen.

Speaker 5 And right away that spread like

Speaker 5 wildfire through that community. And all of a sudden, nobody wanted to get vaccinated.

Speaker 5 When you're dealing with something as contagious as measles, then that community, as they're walking through the town of Gaines or wherever, you know, the Costco or the fast food restaurant, whatever it may be, you can start to spread.

Speaker 5 the virus. So that's what was happening there.
I will say to RFK's credit,

Speaker 5 he did go there and he was conciliatory towards vaccines.

Speaker 5 He did, at least in the moment, recommend the measles vaccine to people, which I thought was really important and really, really good.

Speaker 5 I think since then

Speaker 5 he's sort of backtracked on that.

Speaker 5 Obviously, with COVID, I think COVID seems to be sort of low-hanging fruit because the uptake has been so low already that the idea of saying we're not recommending it anymore was sort of, I think, easy.

Speaker 5 But I think with regard to MMR and other things,

Speaker 5 they're critically important. And, you know, I think hopefully that message continues to get out there.
I think it's changing even in West Texas. I think that you did see increased measles uptake.

Speaker 5 We were at clinics, pop-up clinics, and people were showing up to get measles vaccined that had never been vaccinated in their lives.

Speaker 5 So I think in the throes of something like that, you do see behavior changing a bit.

Speaker 24 It's encouraging.

Speaker 9 In the behavior,

Speaker 32 and I appreciate your reverence, RFK, but it just depends on the day of the week.

Speaker 8 I mean, he says that when he's there on the ground, and then he gets into a cabinet meeting and says, well, we have outbreaks all the time.

Speaker 33 And, you know, even though this disease was substantially,

Speaker 27 you know, what, in 2000, it was declared gone, right?

Speaker 5 Correct. It was declared eliminated at that point.
And there have been some measles outbreaks since then. I mean, there was one in 2019, I think it affected Disneyland in

Speaker 5 California as well, Minnesota, Brooklyn. So there have been measles outbreaks.
But, you know,

Speaker 5 this vaccine hesitancy issue has been around for a while. You know, I've been a reporter for 25 years now almost.

Speaker 5 And I'll tell you what's interesting to me, and I'm curious if this is interesting to you, but if 10 years ago, if you said, who is the most likely person in America to be vaccine hesitant?

Speaker 5 Describe that person. And I think what you would likely have described at that point was a young person, liberal, and woman, usually a modern.

Speaker 11 Oh, yeah, trust me.

Speaker 24 I grew up in the Bay Area, so you can appreciate it in California.

Speaker 11 I know a lot of them. Yeah.

Speaker 27 Perfectly described.

Speaker 5 And now in 2025, I think the demographics have changed in terms of who's most likely to be vaccine hesitant or resistant. Older, white, conservative men.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I'm not a politician, but I'll tell you, I think that

Speaker 5 these issues are used as proxy issues for a larger sort of conflict. I don't, you know, vaccines are the issue I think people glom glum onto.
It's, it's understandable.

Speaker 5 They can sink their teeth into it and all that.

Speaker 5 But within 10 years, even less than that, frankly, I think it was 2019, maybe six years ago, you would have said young liberal woman and now older conservative man.

Speaker 5 I think within six years, it's completely flipped. And I think there's other proxy issues like that as well.

Speaker 5 And I think it just sends a signal that these are, you can't disentangle anything from politics. I never thought of vaccine hesitancy as a political issue.
I thought it was concerned moms.

Speaker 5 My wife would have conversations. Should we get all the vaccines at once or should we spread them out a little bit? And I would sit down and talk to her about anergetic load and all that.

Speaker 5 And I think she definitely listened to me, but it required a conversation.

Speaker 5 So I got that. Now

Speaker 5 it's all politics, it seems. And that's very difficult to sort of confront.

Speaker 8 No, and I mean, I think it goes to our opening conversation.

Speaker 24 I said, well, I mean, that was certainly the case with Michelle Obama.

Speaker 26 I mean, she was just, just ridiculed and attacked for, you know, focusing on healthy foods and focusing on our kids and chronic disease and issues around obesity.

Speaker 29 And that's why I think it's important for those

Speaker 23 that may be critical of the MAGA movement to be at least sensitive to the attributes and the positive components of the MAHA frame that is focusing on the same issue coming at from a different political lens, certainly,

Speaker 8 and not get sort of caught up in this vaccine issue when we focus on the fundamental issues of wellness, which I think we just as a country need to come to grips with.

Speaker 5 I think that's the challenge. People like to look at these in binary ways.
Maha, bad, maha, good. There's goods and bads to it.

Speaker 5 You know, I think there's a lot of stuff that as a health, very health conscious person myself, someone who thinks a lot about longevity. I got parents in 80s.
I got teenage kids.

Speaker 5 I think about this all the time. There's a lot of things that the Maha movement says that I totally agree with.
And again, things that you have been doing in California with regard to our foods.

Speaker 5 I think 70% of illness, chronic disease in this country is preventable.

Speaker 5 And again, we spent four and a half trillion dollars on it. So preventing 70%,

Speaker 5 I mean, medically, obviously, important, but also morally and financially and everything else, the vast majority of those preventable disease, I think, comes in how we nourish ourselves, our food supply.

Speaker 5 So I totally understand that. Again, I wish it didn't have to be done in a mean-spirited way.
You know, it's just not my personality to be vitriolic to get things done.

Speaker 5 But on the other hand, I think people have been talking about trying to reform our food supply for a quarter century and it hasn't really been done.

Speaker 5 Maybe this will, it's already leading to some changes with regard to food dyes and things like that. We'll see where that all lands.

Speaker 5 So I think some of it is really important, but there's other parts of it that I think, and vaccines, I guess, would be the best example where I have real concerns.

Speaker 7 Tune in for more with Dr.

Speaker 18 Sanjay Gupta.

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