I want to read something and get your comment, Michael.

Um, this is from a a piece written by Tatiana Schlozberg, who is the granddaughter of JFK, who's suffering unfortunately uh from a a terminal cancer.

Um, and she wrote in the New Yorker this week, "As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby, her cousin, cut nearly a half billion dollars of research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers, slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest sponsor of medical research, and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings, hundreds of NIH grants, and clinical trials were canceled affecting thousands of patients.

I want to talk about the specific charge that Schllober is making here.

But Michael, start with this what I think of as an incredibly obvious question.

Bobby Kennedy is protege of the country's most famous Democratic family.

his uncle, his father, the two most prominent Kennedys um are both associated with good government.

Government as an ameliorating force in society, government doing the things that private industry can't or or won't.

Obviously, his uncle huge backer of science.

How did it come to pass that I mean this is his cousin who's suffering right now.

Uh she's not alone in that family.

uh in saying that he is not just off the farm, he's completely off the rails.

What what happened in his life that that led to these to to to this situation in in America's most famous family?

I'll start with what how he explains it.

He explains it by saying uh that the party left me.

That what my uncle and my father stood for is what Donald Trump and Republicans stand for today.

Which is a remarkable statement.

I mean he's he's he's serving with a energy secretary who's from industry and he is saying that that this is very different from the rep Republican party of the past.

Um why does he feel that way?

He's on a mission and and there is I mean there was a point where I I I asked him how much of his own personal recovery journey he's a recovering heroin addict.

He has other addiction issues.

He goes to a meeting every single day uh somewhere.

He mentors other people had to do with uh the work he does now.

He said everything uh that that he does is is informed by his recovery.

Um there is a there is a journey he is on.

You know when I asked him how he explained going from being on the outside of the Democratic party HHS secretary, his answer was that it was providential.

So he has caught on to this idea that he has an insight from his own reading of studies, from his own research into the way the medical establishment has missed something serious that is hurting American children if you're talking about the vaccine issue or hurting American health at large if you're talking about chronic disease issue.

Um and when he faced a choice in in the summer of 2024 when his campaign was ending he wasn't going to win.

Trump came along and said join my effort.

And what he was saying to people he were he was close to is I have a chance to save a lot of children.

I'm gonna make the switch.

He was doing it.

It was a missiondriven decision.

And then he had to intellectually come like flip this idea that the Republican party uh is not a liberal party.

How do you save children by cutting the funding for um vaccine and cancer research?

So what would he say to that question?

He would say that the the cuts uh that have happened at HHS are returning HHS's budget to uh you know back 5 to 10 years.

It's not a decimation.

There was enormous increases in the budget.

I'm returning the budget down.

He would say that the bureaucracy was resistant to change and we had to clean out.

He talked about speaking with Elon Musk early on in the administration.

You he bought into the idea of shock and awe.

You have to have momentum.

You have to disrupt the bureaucracy.

Elon Musk's whose Doge was just closed by the federal government as a cost-saving measure.

Correct.

Noting.

Um and and then I think the other part that he he doesn't say as loudly is some of these cuts are not his choice.

Some of these cuts are being imposed on him uh by the White House.

Some of the cuts, the firings happened before he was even confirmed as HHS secretary.

He wasn't responsible for them.

He said that the firing of probationary employees wasn't ideal.

He would rather have kept the probationary employees.

Julie, he's he's pushing on an open door for a lot of people for a reason.

The health establishment, medical establishment is far from perfect.

Is that do you agree with and you've covered this for a long time.

Do you agree that they set themselves up to some degree?

I've certainly never seen a Republican administration go this hard after sort of the healthcare infrastructure, the industry, you know, for for decades.

One of the reasons that the US couldn't get anywhere on health reform is that the Republicans were busy protecting the health care stakeholders, the hospitals and the drug companies and the insurers.

Obviously, Donald Trump not a traditional Republican in that sense.

Um, so it it does look very different than it used to.

And as I said, you know, Congress has mostly been quiet on all of these things.

Yeah.

Dan, from a like a a pandemic perspective, would would any of what we're seeing now, the distrust, the rise of Kennedy, would this have happened without the pandemic?

And uh a response that is going to be argu a response to the pandemic on the part of the federal government that's going to be argued about forever.

I think the pandemic supercharged the Kennedy movement.

I mean, there were tensions that already existed.

People have questions about the bad things that happened to them.

They're looking for answers.

RFK Jr.

allies sometimes offer those answers.

Now, we know from whether him or Chad GPT sometimes the answers you get and what you want to hear, they're not the right answer.

But Kennedy did identify, I think, some real problems in our healthcare system.

We know that there's too much money sometimes going to industry, too much influence on life expectancy.

He was one of the only politicians who talked to me several years ago during a big project about the trends in America.

He was willing to identify that.

Michael, last word to you.

Um, is he set up for success?

Do you think he's going to have a permanent influence on American health?

Uh, uh, well, permanent a long time, but but yes, he's going to have a lasting I mean, the changes that have already happened are having a lasting impact.

I for a Democratic administration winning in 2029 to unwind all this will take years if that's what they want.

And, you know, as Dan said, a lot of these initiatives are bipartisan.

you know, they Democrats want to regulate drug advertising and things like that.

Um, well, thank you.

It's a fascinating conversation and it's not going to end anytime soon, but that's all the time we have tonight, unfortunately.

I want to thank our guests for joining me.