12/7: Face The Nation

The debate over whether they were lawful ramps up on Capitol Hill. We'll talk with the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Connecticut's Jim Himes. Plus, the deportation roundups continue in the nation's cities, this time targeting communities in Minneapolis, including the congresswoman who represents most of the city. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These are people that work--

We'll talk with Representative Ilhan Omar. And finally, a major change to vaccine guidance for newborns recommended by a panel of advisors chosen by health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We've heard do no harm is a moral imperative. We are doing harm. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb joins us to break it all down. It's all just ahead on Face theNation. [MUSIC PLAYING] Good morning, and welcome to Face theNation. We have a lot of News to get to. And we begin with the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. Good to have you here. Good morning, Margaret. Mr. Secretary, a lot of people are out there holiday shopping. Here is how the president described back in April what to expect from this season. Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. Was the president's prediction then correct? Margaret, it's actually been a very strong holiday season, and we've seen across all income cohorts thus far. And so there's nothing to say that there are two dolls instead of 30 dolls.

The president was wrong to predict lower numbers of purchases and higher prices. The economy has been better than we thought. We've had 4% GDP growth in a couple of quarters. We're going to finish the year despite the Schumer shutdown with 3% real GDP growth. Well, the maker of Tonka trucks, their CEO said it's going to cost $40 for their toys right now because of tariffs and inflation. It was $30 the year before that, 25. Prices in the toy space are accelerating, and people are feeling that. Well, Margaret, inflation is a composite number, and it's roughly the same year over year. And if we were to look at all imported goods, imported goods inflation is below the inflation number.

The inflation number, you mean the-- The PC number, which is about 2.9%. Imported goods inflation is about 1.8. It's the service economy that's generating inflation, which actually has nothing to do with tariffs. But when we hear from, for example, the president when he says that affordability is a con job by Democrats, that seems to just not be resonating with consumers that have been polled by CBS. 60% of Americans polled by this network told us President Trump makes prices and inflation sound better than they really are. And his approval rating in the economy is now down to 36% in our latest poll. On inflation, approval is even lower, 32%. Don't you need to show that you feel the pain? Well, Margaret, I think the president is frustrated by the media coverage of what's going on.

This is the polling of-- No, no, no --average Americans. Yeah, but I think the average Americans are hearing a lot of it from media coverage. And I will tell you that affordability has two components. There's inflation, and then there's real incomes. The real incomes are up about 1%. And what we're not going to do is say that Americans don't know what they're feeling. We've been working on it every day. I was on your show on March talking about affordability. We've made a lot of gains. But remember, we've got this embedded inflation from the Biden years where mainstream media, whether it's Greg Ip at The Wall Street Journal, toxic Paul Krugman at New York Timesor former Vice Chair Alan Blinder, all said it was a vibecession. The American people don't know how good they have it. Now, Democrats created scarcity, whether it was in energy or overregulation that we are now seeing this affordability problem. And I think next year, we're going to move on to prosperity.

You do think there is an affordability problem? Sorry? You do believe there's affordability problem? Oh, I think the Biden administration created a terrible--

No, but now. We're nearly 12 months in. You said the president would own the economy at this point. I said that the Biden administration created the worst inflation in 50 years, and maybe, for working Americans, the worst inflation of all time. And we have pulled that number down, that Strategas Research does something called the Common Man Index. Under Biden, the accumulated inflation number, as measured by CPI, was about 20%. Their index showed 35. This year, for the first time, the common man index is below the inflation index because the basket of goods for working Americans, food gasoline, rent is coming down. So I wrote an essay, March 12, 2024, and it talked about the three I's, immigration, interest rates, and inflation. Mass, unfettered immigration, depressed wages caused housing prices to go up. President has closed the border. That is fixed. Interest rates have come down. The bond market just had the best year since 2020. And now we are working on inflation. And I expect inflation to roll down strongly next year. Well, I mean, grocery prices are up nearly 3% compared to last September. The president seems to be acknowledging that grocery prices, or at least beef prices, are a challenge because he put out this order just yesterday saying they're going to investigate corporate price gouging for high beef prices. Isn't suing the food companies the same thing the Biden administration did, and it didn't really work? How is this any different? Nothing the Biden administration did worked.

So why are you doing it? Because this isn't the same thing. If they had done this, if they'd done it properly, we'd be in a different spot. And beef is one component. Thanksgiving Turkey was down 16%. Well, I know you are working on the trade front and for American farmers and the prices that they are experiencing, that they're feeling a pinch about not having a market to sell into necessarily. Not anymore. Well, the agricultural secretary just said that the president is going to announce a bridge payment for farmers this week to give them short-term relief while you're working on finalizing these trade packages. There are these low crop prices and the soybeans, in particular. I know you spoke with China's vice premier Friday. Are they going to speed purchasing up? Well, they're not going to speed purchasing up. There in the cadence that we agreed to. Soybean prices are up about 12% or 15% since the agreement with the Chinese. They are going to buy 12.5 million metric tons. But, Margaret, I'm involved in the agriculture industry. I run a soybean farm. And I can tell you-- You own one. You invest in it. Sorry? You own or invest a soybean farm. And people in my family go out and work on it. I actually just divested it this week as part of my ethics agreement, so I'm out of that business. But I probably know more about any Treasury Secretary than about agriculture since the 1800s. And I can tell you that what farmers need is certainty. And we have put that in place with this trade deal, 12.5 million metric tons this year, 25 million metric tons for the next three years for soybeans, also sorghum and lumber.

So those purchases, just to clarify, those will be this year because I heard you say this past week that some of the purchases wouldn't take place until February? Well, for the season. So the crop year.

The season year. Yeah. OK. If everything's fine, then why do farmers need a bridge payment from the Agricultural Department. Sorry?

Why would farmers need a bridge payment from the Agriculture Department then? Because these prices haven't come in because the Chinese actually used our soybean farmers as pawns in the trade negotiations. And we are going to create this bridge because, again, agriculture is all about the future. You've got to start financing for planning next year when things will be very good.

I want to ask you about something that was announced this past week, the Trump accounts, and building on this concept. So parents, as I understand, are going to be able to open these accounts via the Treasury for their kids. They're tax-deferred investment vehicles to US citizen children under 18, get $1,000 from the government for babies born between 2025 and 2028. So there are going to be restrictions on what the money can be used for, college tuition or their first house. Is that right? No, it Is that the federal government for children born in the period you just described is going to put $1,000 into these Trump accounts. It will be invested in a widely diversified low-cost index. And then it will be available-- In the stock market, In the stock market. An exchange-traded fund or mutual fund. So in essence, it is a trust fund. It is a piece of the American economy for every child, and they will be able to take it out when they're 18, or they can convert it to a more IRA type program and keep it for their retirement.

So there won't be the restrictions I mentioned there about how they use the money? No. OK. So there was also a broadening of this this past week with the Dell Foundation making a significant investment in the American children. So how is this going to work? Why structure it this way instead of a savings account, for example? Well, a savings account just gets interest. This is the compounding power of the stock market. As Warren Buffett says, don't bet against the American stock market, don't bet against the economy. And this is going to bring a whole group of new investors into the market. We're going to couple it with a big amount of financial literacy so that children understand what they own. The incredible gift by Michael and Susan Dell is a program that philanthropists, foundations can do to top up these accounts. And we are expecting-- Treasury is already in discussions with foundations, with major philanthropists to top up these accounts. It could either be for all children, or you can specify it by zip code, a school district, or you can do what the Dells did and say that it won't apply to the zip codes of the top 20% of earners. And more information is going to be coming out on how to use this and access it?

Yes, in the coming weeks, we'll do that. And then the official kickoff will be July 5.

Before I let you go, I want to ask you about this massive fraud out in Minnesota. In the state welfare program has been under federal investigation since all the way back in 2022. The president told you, though, this week, to look into Somalis who, quote, "ripped off that state for billions of dollars." He said they contribute nothing. What exactly are you investigating? Well, Margaret, to be clear, the initial fraud was discovered by the IRS, for which I'm the acting commissioner, was discovered by IRS Criminal Investigations Unit. This was not an endogenous thing that the state of Minnesota decided. We had to go in and clean up the mess for them. And this is part of the continued cleanup. A lot of money has been transferred from the individuals who committed this fraud, including those who donated to the governor, donated to Representative Omar, donated to AG Ellison, but they've been transferred to something called MBSes. And those are-- Mortgage-backed securities. What do you mean? Sorry? Transferred to what? These are the bureau services. And they are wire transfer organizations that are outside the regulated banking system. And that money has gone overseas. And we are tracking that both to the Middle East and to Somalia to see what the uses of that have been.

But you have no evidence of that money being used to fuel terrorism at this point, which is what some conservative writers are alleging? That's why it's an investigation. We started it last week. We'll see where it goes. But I can tell you that it's terrible. Representative Omar tried to downplay it and said, oh, it was very tough to know how this money should be used. She was gaslighting the American people.

Well, we'll talk to her. Yeah. When you come to this country, you got to learn which side of the road to drive on. You got to learn to stop at stop signs, and you got to learn not to defraud the American people. Well, there are plenty of criminal behavior from communities well beyond the immigrant community. But we'll talk about this with Representative Omar shortly. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Good. We'll be back in a minute. Stay with us. And we're joined now by Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Margaret, for having me. We have a lot to get to with you, but I want to pick up on where the Treasury secretary just left off. He alleged that people who were tied to you or your campaign were involved in this broad, brazen scheme to rip off the Minnesota state welfare system. Do you want to respond to that? Do you know what he is referring to? I really don't. And I don't think the secretary himself understands what he's referring to. We obviously had people who were able to donate to our campaign that were involved. We send that money back a couple of years ago. And actually, I was one of the first members of Congress to send a letter to the secretary of ag asking them to look into what I thought was a reprehensible fraud that was occurring within the program.

So this was, just for our audience-- the binary Justice Department called it the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country. And this was pocketing COVID-era welfare funds, more than a billion dollars in taxpayer money that was stolen. It was pretty shocking. Of the 87 people charged, all but 8 are of Somali descent. And that has added to the spotlight being put specifically on your community. Why do you think this fraud was allowed to get so widespread? I want to say, this also has an impact on Somalis because we are also taxpayers in Minnesota. We also could have benefited from the program and the money that was stolen. And so it's been really frustrating for people to not acknowledge the fact that we're also as Minnesotans, as taxpayers really upset and angry about the fraud that has occurred. So do you think, though, that there was a failure by the Democratic state government to police itself? This is a brazen, fraudulent activity here. Yeah, and that is what I alluded to in my letter that I sent to the secretary of ag was to see where things were going wrong. How can this amount of money disappear fraudulently without there being alarms being set off? And it is something that we have to continue to investigate. We have to continue to ask those questions.

Because as you know, one of the initial defenses by the organization at the heart of the fraud, Feeding our Future, was to claim the probe was due to racism. Do you think that this was all about negligence or that it was like political fear of alienating the Somali community? So you have to remember that the women who led the program is a Caucasian woman, and that was her way of making sure that this would continue to happen by using whatever rhetoric that was available to her. We do know that when the money was stopped, they did sue. The AG, Attorney General Keith Ellison, defended the department in that lawsuit. It was a judge that said that money should continue to go out. And so this wasn't something that people were not looking at. There was always those alarms. And we will continue to understand where things might have gone wrong as these investigations continue and as these fraudsters are prosecuted and sent to jail.

Well, it's going to have impact for your community because we've already heard that the head of Medicare and Medicaid say they're going to have a new policy that applies to Minnesota. You heard the Treasury secretary say they're investigating, but there's another thread here. Because House Republicans and the Treasury secretary just now talked about a link to terrorism, a possible link. He said they're just now beginning to look into it. How confident are you that that's a false claim? I'm pretty confident at the moment because there are people who have been prosecuted and who have been sentenced. If there was a linkage in the money that they had stolen going to terrorism, then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out and basically charging them with these charges. And so I do know that for many years, this sort of alarm that there is money being transferred through the airport in bags and going to terrorism has-- that accusation has always existed. There has never been here and there in those accusations. But if that is the case, if money from US tax dollars is being sent to help with terrorism in Somalia, we want to know, and we want those people prosecuted, and we want to make sure that doesn't ever happen again. So there are 80,000 people of Somali descent in your state. But the president has been very focused not just on them but on you. In this extraordinary cabinet meeting, he said, Somalis, quote, "come from hell. They complain, and they do nothing but bitch." Take a listen. These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain. And from where they came from, they got nothing. We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. [KNOCKING] Thank you very much, everybody. That knocking is vehement agreement from his cabinet members there. I just wonder what the reaction is in your district to have that from the highest office in the land. It's disgusting. It's completely disgusting. These are Americans that he is calling garbage. And we feel like there is an unhealthy obsession that he has on the Somali community and an unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me. I think it is also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president.

And 95% of the Somalis in your state are US citizens-- Yes. --just for clarity there. But the president has restricted all immigration processing, including asylum claims from Somalis already on US soil, along with 18 other countries. ICE reports it has rounded up about 19 people, and they put out press releases with the images of about five of them that they say are the worst of the worst. Is that the entirety of the crackdown to date? Yeah, so far, we know of the people that they've picked up in Minnesota. About five of them are Somalis. And from what I have read and from the people that I've spoken to, all of them had already had orders of removal. So these are not people who are undocumented, but people who have committed crimes and who should have already been sent out of the country. I want to ask you about something else that the architect of the president's immigration policy, Stephen Miller, said. On Thanksgiving Day, he posted no magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions and terrors of their broken homelands. What do you make of this argument of failure to assimilate and ruining America? How do you understand this? I mean, when I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric--

That's how you hear it. --it reminds me-- yes, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany. And as we know, there have been many immigrants who have tried to come to the United States who've turned back, one of them being Jewish immigrants. We know the way that people were described who were coming from Ireland, Irish immigrants. We know the way in which people were described back then when they were Italian immigrants. And to me, we're, yes, of course, ethnically Somali. We are in this country as Americans. We are citizens. We are productive part of this nation. And we will continue to be. Congresswoman Omar, thank you for your time today. And we'll be right back with a lot more Face theNation. Stay with us. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to Face theNation. We turn now to the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Jim Himes. He joins us this morning from Connecticut. Welcome back to Face the Nation. Thanks for having me, Margaret. You are one of the few lawmakers shown the classified version of this September 2 video of the US strikes and alleged drug boat near Venezuela, four strikes in total we've learned. You met with Admiral Bradley, who commands Special Operations as well. The president of the United States says he's open to this video being made public. Do you think it is essential that it become public, and are you confident it will be? I think it's really important that this video be made public. It's not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself. I know how the public is going to react because I felt my own reaction. I've spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken, often in the terrorism context. And this video was profoundly shaken. And I think it's important for Americans to see it because, look, there's a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners. But I think it's really important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under just so that they have a visceral feel for what it is that we're doing. Why did it shake you so much? What specifically was bothering you? Well, and this is the distinction, and there's a lot to unpack here about whether this is an authorized military action, which it is not and right on down to whether these were legitimate targets, and they were not. But let me go back to some of the reviews I've done of other lethal action. Oftentimes, when the Department of Defense takes a strike against a terrorist in Yemen or Pakistan or wherever, you watch a video of guys fully armed with AK-47s, and sidearms, and bombs, and you name it, and they're on their way to do something terrible. And in this instance, you may have had bad guys. I have no doubt that these guys were involved in the running of drugs. Now, whether they were running it to the United States or Europe is yet another question. But in that instance, these guys were about to die. Had the United States just walked away, their little piece of wood would have gone under the waves. And as many times as Tom Cotton may say that it doesn't matter what they were doing, it matters essentially what they were doing because under the law-- and if you've spent 15 minutes in law school, you know this. Under the law, if someone has been struck and continues to engage in hostilities, points a gun at you, has a gun, they may be a legitimate target. But if they are outside of combat, they are not, and attacking them is a violation of the laws of war. And these guys-- and this is why the American people need to see this video. These guys were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities. Well, the DOD Law of War Manual seems to hinge a lot of that on whether the person is wholly disabled from fighting. And that is where the Secretary of Defense has used language saying they're about to return to the fight. I want to play for you what Secretary Hegseth said at the Reagan Forum Saturday. He described what was happening with these four strikes on the alleged drug running boat. A couple of hours later, I was told, hey, there had to be a re-attack because there were a couple folks that could still be in the fight, access to radios. There was a linkup point of another potential boat. Drugs were still there. There were actively interacting with them. Had to take that read. I said, roger, sounds good. Does what Hegseth said match what Admiral Bradley told you? Well, there was a lot of lack of clarity over exactly what Pete Hegseth role here was. But Pete Hegseth has no credibility on this matter. Remember, a week after this strike, there was a briefing for Congress. Why was a follow-up strike taken? The answer then, in the first week of September was a follow-up strike was taken because we needed to clear the wreckage so that there wasn't a danger to navigation. That was explanation number one. Explanation number two before we watched the video was that they might have had a radio, and they might have been radioing a boat, and they might have been trying to recover the cocaine. And then when you actually watch the video, you realize they don't have a radio. They're barely hanging on and not slipping beneath the waves. Then we get this thing of how they're trying to right the boat. This was about a 40-foot boat that had just been hit with a massive piece of munitions. The conflagration probably destroyed everything in that boat, but oh, maybe they might have swum under, gotten a radio, probably waterlogged, and radioed a boat that we're not even sure was there. So what we've had is a series of shifting explanations. Oh, and including the fog of war. You know that Hegseth said, well, they took the second strike because of the fog of war. There was no fog. The military watched this boat very carefully, or I shouldn't even say boat. They watched the wreckage of the boat very carefully for a long period of time before they took the second strike. So look, what Pete Hegseth says about this strike has zero credibility at this point. Do you have confidence in Admiral Bradley? Admiral Bradley, this was my first meeting with him. Anyone who has ever worked with Admiral Bradley will tell you that he has a storied career and that he is a man of deep, deep integrity. And frankly, I have no reason to doubt that. What it raises is, what happens when an apparently good man like Admiral Bradley is placed in a context where he knows that if he countermands an order that he is perhaps uncomfortable with, it is very likely that he will be fired, when he works for a guy, Pete Hegseth, who wrote a book about how we shouldn't observe the laws of war, about how we need to be lethal, and so it's interesting to think about how a good man, in that context, maybe does something that if he weren't in that context, he might not do. Well, Senator Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there were dozens of JAG lawyers observing all of this. On NBC this morning, he said all 11 people on the suspected drug smuggling boat were valid targets because the US had high confidence they were part of a foreign terrorist organization. Do you know, were these high-level cartel members? No, of course not. Of course not.

Who were they? If the US had high confidence-- You think Pablo Escobar back-- well, first of all, first of all, let's be super clear about this. I don't think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two, I don't know. But we certainly didn't know the identities of all 11. So nobody can characterize who all these people in any of these boats are. Now I have enough confidence in the intelligence community to know that these are probably not guys out fishing or guys out being tourists and stuff. They are almost certainly running drugs. But this really matters for the reason that you said. If you're going to occupy an immense amount of the American naval combat capability, you'd like to believe that you're going after the leaders, the cartel leaders, the kingpins, as they say. What we're doing here is we're taking out the equivalent of the corner drug dealer in the Bronx, which, by the way, we should arrest the corner drug dealer in the Bronx. But the main reason we do that is to go after the kingpins, who, I promise you, are sitting in very comfortable villas right now in Colombia and Venezuela and everywhere and watching as much of the United States Navy is dedicated to taking out their lowest level employees. So I hear you saying they were not on an internal military target list for high-value individuals. That's what I hear what you're saying. Well, this is an interesting question. I'm not at all convinced that there is a list of individuals. Now, this is what we do in the terrorism world. We designate high-value targets. We designate individuals. I have no reason to believe, and in fact, I doubt that there are any individuals on a list anywhere. What we are doing-- and I'm not going to get terribly specific about it for obvious reasons. But what we are doing is we're picking up that this boat may be carrying drugs. And to the administration, it doesn't matter who's in that boat-- and look, they're saying this-- because if this boat is actually carrying drugs, then we can strike it. So no, I don't think there is a list of individuals. I don't think we have any idea who precisely the individuals in these boats are. So as I understand it, these are signature strikes. This is an intelligence assessment based on signals intelligence saying this is who we believe these individuals to be. Some of these defenders of the Trump policy, like conservative columnists, have argued this is a precedent that was set by the Obama administration, which used signature strikes to kill alleged al-Qaeda operatives, including a US citizen at one point in Yemen. Do they have a point here that the drone policy has long allowed the killing of suspected criminals, even without due process? Well, there's a couple of really important distinctions. And you'll remember that the Obama administration, there was a lot of debate over whether signature strikes were OK or not. The most important distinction is that Congress authorized the war on terror. There is an authorization for the use of military force. The original sin of this whole thing, whether you think we should be wasting these guys or not-- the original sin is that there is no congressional authorization. And then in the Obama administration, they did have a list of individuals, often High-Value Targets, or HVTs as we referred to them. And then the question was, if you have an HVT, a High-Value Target in a Jeep in northern Pakistan, and there's a guy next to that HVT, how do you feel about taking that strike? You want to take down the high-value guy. But what about the young guy next to him? Well, the young guy has an AK-47, and the young guy was actually arranging for the transfer of explosives. You have that conversation. And then you decide whether you're going to take the strike. Right now, what we're doing-- and again, I don't think that there's a list of individuals anywhere. They're just saying that boat is carrying drugs. And even though military is not authorized by the Congress of the United States, we're taking out the boat, and we don't give a damn about who's on it. And when you say I don't think, you are a member of the Gang of Eight, so presumably that information should be shared with you if it does exist. I want to ask you before I let you go-- Signalgate. People may remember a few months ago that a Trump official added a journalist to an online group on Signal and shared advanced information of an upcoming bombing operation in Yemen. The Pentagon inspector general said Hegseth's actions risked operational security and violated federal laws on record keeping. Hegseth said he'd do the same thing all over again. Are your Republican colleagues saying in private that they have problems with what happened? Absolutely, they're saying it in private. In public, of course, they're saying that it was perfect exoneration-- and you read the key line-- that this report that said that the Secretary of Defense put his troops in the mission at risk, that that's total exoneration. Now, I didn't hear the comment about I would do this again. But if Pete Hegseth said he would do that again-- and look, again, you don't need to be a military expert to understand that sharing operational details before an operation is a really, really, really bad idea. If Pete Hegseth said that he would do that, again, he's just reinforcing what we all know, which is that he has absolutely no business in that job. One of the most sensitive and difficult jobs to do in the United States government is being done by somebody who put his own people and the mission at risk. He said he lives life without regret at the Reagan Forum. That was the phrase to be more exact. But Congressman Himes, always good to have you on the program. I'll have to leave it there for today. We'll be right back. For a look at some recent changes to US public health policy, we're joined now by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He also serves on the boards of Pfizer and UnitedHealthcare. Welcome back. Thank you. There was some pretty big news on Friday. And the American Academy of Pediatrics said they are deeply alarmed that the CDC's vaccine advisory panel, ACIP, voted in this 8-3 decision to change this 30-year long policy regarding hepatitis B and newborns. They are now recommending delaying the dose until a child is two months old, instead of within 24 hours of birth. What does this decision mean for families of newborns? Yeah, well, look, I think we first need to understand why we give that birth dose of the vaccine. Because the idea of giving a vaccine to a newborn, to a lot of parents, sounds discomforting, that the first thing a child is going to face when they're born is going to be a vaccine within the first 24 hours. For a child over the age of five, if they develop hepatitis B infection, if they're exposed to it, they're going to have a 95% chance of clearing that infection, and they'll go on to develop lifelong immunity. For children between the ages of 1 and 5, they only have about a 25% to 50% chance of clearing the infection. So about 25% to 50% of kids will develop chronic infection, and about a quarter of them will go on to die from hepatitis B if they're between the ages of 1 and 5. So children are more vulnerable to this virus and can't clear the infection. But when you're talking about a newborn and infant, 90% of newborns who become infected-- and they'll become infected during delivery-- will go on to develop chronic infection. They won't be able to clear the hepatitis B. And about 25% of them will die from sequelae of that infection, either from liver disease, cirrhosis, or from liver cancer. So we have this unique opportunity by giving this birth dose and the subsequent inoculations to virtually eliminate the chance that a newborn can contract hepatitis B and go on to develop chronic infections. Almost 99% effective at preventing that chronic infection. And one final point-- the refrain is-- oh, sorry, please. No, no. And this decision now is to wait two months before giving that dose. The president of the United States came out and said this was very good because hep B is only transmitted sexually or through dirty needles. Yeah. Look, that's the problem. That's simply not true. The fact is there's a refrain that if you just test the moms while they're pregnant, you can detect whether they have hepatitis B, and if they have hepatitis B, you continue to give that birth dose. But the reality is many moms don't get tested even though they intend to. Many times those test results aren't checked. And the tests themselves have a false negative rate, meaning they're going to say don't have hepatitis B when, in fact, you do of about 2%. That may not sound like a lot, but that 2% is going to translate into at least a thousand babies being born and getting infected with hepatitis B. There was one modeling estimate that estimated in the first year of this new guidance, there's going to be 1,400 children, infants contracting hepatitis B, and again, 25% of them will die from that infection. Well, we look at this because there is this broader scrutiny of vaccines right now by the Trump administration. And in this board decision, which the public could listen into-- it was publicly broadcast, that the board was handpicked by RFK Jr., who is a skeptic here of vaccines. From those who voted against the decision to delay, one of them, who you heard at the top of the show, said the CDC is doing harm. Another said no rational science has been presented and the committee must accept responsibility when harm is caused. Those are pretty extraordinary statements. If the group making a decision that has such high consequences for the most vulnerable Americans isn't basing it on science, no rational science, what does that indicate about what comes next? Well, look, this is-- ACIP, by and large, except for a handful of members, are anti-vax activists who were put there to carry out a specific agenda. And look, the secretary, to his credit, has been very honest about what his intentions are here. He's the most prominent anti-vaxxer in the country prior to coming into this position. And he stated that his goal is to eliminate childhood immunization or many of these childhood immunizations. And I think they're going to take a methodical approach and slowly chip away at this. This is a big unforced error, insofar as ACIP was a esteemed body that a lot of states tied their own decision-making to. And what we're seeing right is as a group, it's being degraded, and I don't think it will ever be restored. I don't think you can just flip the switch and restore this, where people are going to suddenly respect its decisions again. There's about 600 state laws that were tied to decisions ACIP made. About 17 states have already passed new legislation saying they'll no longer respect the decisions of ACIP. The insurers came out and said they're going to tie their own coverage decisions to the professional bodies like the American Academy of Pediatrics and not ACIP.

Wow. So I think, in time, ACIP is going to be fully degraded as a decision-making body, and it's going to be more symbolic. There'll be certain states that adhere to it. But it'll be more symbolic. This week, we saw a big selloff in biotech stocks following these reports that the FDA, which you used to run at the first part of the Trump administration, is now going to require one study to clinch approval of vaccines. You were one of the former commissioners who put out this really extraordinary editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, arguing that the FDA and top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, are changing policies in a way that's going to slow down new and better vaccines. What specifically is the problem you see? Because this isn't just hep B. This is the vaccines of the future you're saying just won't be created. Right. So Vinay Prasad, who is the head of the Biologics Center, also oversees the vaccine division. He also has been appointed the head of biostatistics, the chief medical officer of the agency, and the chief scientific officer, so he occupies a lot of positions, put out a memo saying that they're going to do away with or move away from what they call immunobridging studies. These are studies that allow you for well-validated vaccines, like the flu vaccine, to be able to demonstrate each year that the vaccine, the new vaccine that's formulated against the circulating strain, can elicit antibodies that are effective against that particular strain. And that could be the basis of approval, rather than requiring new outcome studies every year to prove that the vaccine actually reduces the incidence of influenza. For established vaccines, where we know that antibody production is a good correlate for immunity, this has been a long-standing practice. We do it for flu vaccine. We do it in COVID certainly. We do it for things like pneumococcal vaccine, the vaccine for pneumococcal disease, where we look at serotypes, circulating bacterial serotypes. This allows us to update vaccines as these viral and bacterial strains change and as the composition of the strains change in time to provide protection for the fall respiratory season. If they move away from this, which is what he said they plan to do, we're just not going to be able to update vaccines each season, as we've done historically, to accommodate whatever the circulating strain is.

And 12 former FDA commissioners came out saying they're deeply concerned about what is happening. That memo that made clear the changes that are happening within the FDA from Dr. Prasad was obtained by CBS, and it claimed that career FDA staff are making changes, in part, because they found at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving the COVID vaccine, referred to it as a profound revelation and said and asked, did it kill more healthy kids than it saved? The administration to date has not backed up information to back up these claims. But what questions do you have for the FDA commissioner because they're arguing they're doing this to help people? Yeah, look, well, first of all, one thing doesn't flow from the next. So the idea if, in fact, they found cases where the COVID vaccine was linked to tragic deaths, it doesn't then follow that you make these policy changes. In fact, the policy changes wouldn't address what their concerns are related to the COVID vaccine itself. Every case needs to be carefully adjudicated. It's tragic to see any suspected case that could be linked to a vaccine. And these were looked at previously by the FDA. And I don't believe that the new FDA had access to the case-level data. Analysis of cases, individual cases that get filed with the agency where there is a death in proximity to vaccination-- and some of these are filed by the manufacturers themselves-- are very subjective and require the goodwill of the people involved in that. And so I think that they should make that analysis public so it could be scrutinized and people can get comfort in it. They've already backed away from the 10. There's reporting from Endpoints that now they're saying it's 8 or 9. So they're already backing away from it. OK, and HHS said they will eventually make that data public. We'll look for it when it comes out. Dr. Gottlieb, thank you for your analysis today. We'll be back in a moment. Our Lesley Stahl spoke with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene about her relationship with President Trump for 60Minutes.

I'm going to ask you about this almost solid support he has among Republicans in Congress. Is there in that support fear? Does the support come about because they're afraid that they'll get death threats? I think they're terrified to step out of line and get a nasty Truth Social post on them, yes. And they're watching what happened to you. Yes. Behind the scenes, do they talk differently? Yes. How? Oh, it would shock people. Well, let's shock people. OK, I watch many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him to when he won the primary in 2024, they all started, excuse my language, Lesley, kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time.

You can see more of Lesley's interview tonight on 60Minutes at 7:00 PM Eastern. We'll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] That's it for us today. Thank you all for watching. Until next week, for Face the Nation,I'm Margaret Brennan. [MUSIC PLAYING]