Doctor reacts to RFK Jr.'s Senate testimony

So if the bias is disclosed-- It's not a financial conflict-- --that they are expert witnesses. ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: It's not a financial conflict of interests. Let me finish up. Let me finish up. Kennedy also called Dr. Susan Monarez, who he pressed the Senate to confirm as CDC director, only to fire her 29 days after she took the job, a liar. Senators appeared astonished at that assertion in today's committee hearing. Monarez wrote in today's Wall Street Journal,I was told, quote, "to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked," she went on to write, "the results are predetermined. This isn't reform. It is sabotage," unquote. Just a quick reminder. When President Trump nominated Monarez to lead the CDC, he vowed that she and RFK Jr. would, quote, "prioritize Accountability, High Standards, and Disease Prevention to finally address the Chronic Disease Epidemic and, MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN!" About all of this, we turn now with confidence to Nikole Killion on Capitol Hill. A lot said in the hearing, and then you had interesting conversations, Nikole, after the hearing. What were some of those takeaways? Yeah, well, look, I mean, it was combative on all sides. You had senators, both Democrat and Republican, unloading on Secretary Kennedy, but he, too, was pointing the finger right back and really taking issue at some times, even calling some of these senators liars or saying that he doesn't know what they're talking about. So it was a very heated exchange with a lot of discussion about a number of issues, whether that was access to vaccines, the efficacy of vaccines, relitigating COVID and how the first Trump administration handled that, this vaccine advisory committee and Kennedy's decision to fire many of those officials, the, obviously, ongoing situation at the CDC. So there was a lot to get at. At times, as I mentioned, very contentious, with some name calling. Senator Maria Cantwell at one point calling Secretary Kennedy a charlatan. Take a listen to what she told me right after that. Why did you call the secretary a charlatan? Because look up the definition of charlatan. He fits it very well. He's conflating issues and trying to confuse people instead of presenting accurate information. So she pressed him quite a bit during that hearing over the vaccine issue. Also, some Republicans also expressed a lot of their concerns. It wasn't just people like Senator Bill Cassidy, who is the chair of the Senate Health Committee, but we also heard from Senator Barrasso, a top GOP leader in the Senate who questioned Secretary Kennedy pretty extensively about vaccine access, as did Senator Thom Tillis. But Cassidy was critical and really tangled with Kennedy at times. As I mentioned, he helms the Senate Health Committee. So I asked him whether he plans to call the secretary back here to Capitol Hill. Take a listen to that exchange. Are you satisfied with the secretary's answers, sir, and will you call him in to testify before your panel? Again, right now, why don't we just allow what happened, the exchange there, to stand on its own? So again, Cassidy kind of holds the cards there and keeping them pretty close to the vest, but he has said that there does need to be more oversight conducted, though what that looks like remains to be seen. The ranking member on the Senate Health Committee, Bernie Sanders, has made clear that he does want to hear from Secretary Kennedy. He also wants to hear from that fired CDC director, Susan Monarez.

Nikole Killion, thank you so very, very much. I appreciate it. Disease expert Dr. Michael Osterholm joins me now. He is the author of the new book, The BigOne-- How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Doctor, it's great to have you with me.

Thank you. Help my audience sort all this out, where Kennedy is, what's happening at HHS, what's happening at CDC and the FDA. Well, I can put it very succinctly in the fact that our vaccine world is now in freefall. This is the most dangerous time I've known in the 50 years I've been in the business, and it's because of the fact that there's an agenda here that's not about protecting our children or protecting adults. It's about an ideology. And I think until we recognize that and deal with that, we're going to continue to see the vaccines threatened in terms of their availability and who will have access to them. And, Doctor, it's my impression that this is no longer a conversation about COVID vaccines or mandates. It has spread. Florida announced just yesterday that it is going to end mandates for an entire battery of childhood vaccines that have been used for decades-- measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, hepatitis B, and the like. Right. This is, in fact, something that's happening not just in Washington, DC, but around the country, but it surely is gaining legs as a result of Mr. Kennedy's approach and what he's doing. He continues to misrepresent the information. In a kind way, I can say that. For example, today in the hearing, he said that only one single study had ever been done in childhood vaccines that was what we call a randomized controlled trial where some of the people got a placebo. Some people got the vaccine. We've identified 511 such studies that have been done for all 12 of the childhood vaccines. Mr. Kennedy has been given this information multiple times and yet continues to misrepresent it. So one of the challenges we have is this is not about education. This is not about getting him to come together with other experts-- which, by the way, he's never done. He's never been briefed by any of the experts at the CDC on this issue. Again, it's basically all about ideology. And when he says, as he did at the hearing, that the pharmaceutical industry has used its leverage to stack panels or to get things before the FDA and rush them through, how would you evaluate that line of criticism? That's simply, again, not true, and the record bears that out. All the information for which a vaccine is approved or disapproved by the FDA from public companies that make these vaccines is all made public, so you have it in advance. Today, he was asked, would he provide the kind of background information that he's using to make his recommendations? And he refused to. He said that they will go ahead and make the recommendations from this new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, but it wouldn't be available to the public. Your book is about the next pandemic, but let's talk about the one most recently in our rear-view mirror. If you could assess things that went wrong, even though the intentions were good, what would they be? Well, first of all, we all have to recognize you go through three years of what we went through, even under the best of circumstances, there's going to be things you'd surely like to redo. What my real concern is right now is that unlike the 9/11 Commission, which gave us a bipartisan, really down-to-earth review of what happened or didn't happen or should have happened, and those recommendations were then put into place on a bipartisan basis. We've not done that with COVID. We've asked for that kind of review. We believe it's a very important one so that we can learn the lessons of that COVID experience, and that's going to be important because, in the future, we are going to have other pandemics, which could even be bigger. And one of the things I deduced in the book is that public-health officials have to acknowledge in public that there are trade-offs and that they should err on the side of keeping things open as best as possible, and there was probably an overreaction or a rush to closure during some stages of COVID. Is that a fair summary? Well, I think, actually, there's a bit of revisionist history going on right now with the pandemic. For example, CDC has continued to be blamed for what happened with schools. They had no impact on schools relative to their ability to close. That was made at a local and state level, and that was often as a result of parents and teachers concerned about whether or not they would get infected being in school. And we eventually had studies showing that up to 80% of the transmission in households actually originated from a child who got infected in school. And so, again, I don't have a perfect answer for that other than to say that this is the kind of thing that we have to ask ourselves, when do you end up closing? When do you not close, and how does that look? And we do need to have that discussion, which we've not had. And what's the most important thing we, as a nation, can do to prepare for the inevitability, you write, of the next big pandemic? Well, I think to some people's surprise, I'm a real optimist, and my optimism actually comes from the fact that we can, with the right kind of support and planning, actually, I think, devise vaccines that could be very, very effective in a pandemic. They could be available, and they could prevent individuals from becoming infected-- at very least, keeping them from becoming seriously ill. That all has been taken off the table right now. This administration just canceled $500 million of support for mRNA vaccines right now for influenza. So, in a sense, we're going backwards on what could be a very positive development. Dr. Michael Osterholm, it's a great book. I appreciate your time, and thanks so much for coming in. Thank you.