When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on June 9, I was devastated but not surprised. He is a longtime vaccine critic, and it was clear to me that he was gunning for the panel, which gives recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines.
Though there has been public mistrust of new vaccines, this is not a group that has historically been politicized. In fact, this is the first time that a health and human services secretary has dismissed the full panel. The voting members of the advisory committee are highly vetted experts who typically meet three times a year, and they consider the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, as well as the feasibility of their recommendations. There’s a legitimate fear that if the committee stops recommending certain vaccines, they won’t be covered by insurance, and Americans will have to pay out of pocket to get them.
On June 10, Kennedy posted on X that he was going to handpick the new panel and that “none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.” He then appointed eight members to the committee, one of whom posted this month, “The term ‘anti-vaxer’ it is not a slur, but a compliment. Embrace it. Own it. and be proud to be a part of this fight.” Oy.
As I was processing this information with new horror, I had a possibly perverse response: the urge to listen to a four-hour-and-27-minute “Huberman Lab” podcast interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, because the episode was called “Improving Science & Restoring Trust in Public Health” and was recorded before the advisory committee overhaul.
Bhattacharya, who was a professor of health policy at Stanford University and has an M.D. and a Ph.D., was one of the creators of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, which argued that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short- and long-term public health.” His skepticism of mainstream public health during the Biden administration undoubtedly helped Bhattacharya get his current job.
From what I know of Andrew Huberman, he can communicate some scientific concepts quite well, but I am suspicious about his supplement recommendations, his coziness with advertisers and his softball interviews with people like Casey Means. Still, neither Huberman nor Bhattacharya is a vaccine ideologue like Kennedy, and they both have expertise.
Mostly, I wanted to listen because Bhattacharya is absolutely correct about one thing: The public has lost a great deal of trust in health institutions, and anyone who cares about the well-being of our nation needs to pay attention to that loss of credibility.
I have some areas of agreement with Bhattacharya — I never understood why the United States was out of step with W.H.O. recommendations on masking children under 5 — and I wanted to start there. Dismissing people out of hand without hearing them out and assuming all people who appear to be on the same side believe the same things (and that people on opposing sides can never agree) are part of what got us to this bleak place of low trust.
According to polling published in May from the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, “Less than half of the public express at least some confidence in agencies like the C.D.C. and Food and Drug Administration to carry out many of their responsibilities.” Gallup has asked about trust in the medical system since the 1970s. In 2024, 17 percent of Americans said they had a “great deal” of trust in the medical system, down from 44 percent in 1975 — though full confidence in the system has been pretty low since the 1990s.
I will never trust Kennedy. He seems uninterested in earning the trust of anyone who doesn’t already agree with him, and his reports cite imaginary studies. But if Bhattacharya and Huberman, who has one of the most popular health-related podcasts in the country, can help regain credibility for science and medicine writ large, I welcome that, even if I have profound disagreements with them, too.
Bhattacharya mostly sidestepped questions from Huberman about the scientific research funding that was decimated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. For example, on the across-the-board cuts to indirect costs, which help cover overhead for colleges and universities engaged in federally backed research, Bhattacharya said that because those cuts are currently being litigated, he couldn’t comment on them. I am not confident that all of this funding will be restored, even if he fights some of the cuts behind the scenes, though there were some positive legal developments this week.
On vaccines, Bhattacharya occupied a middle ground between anti-vaccine absolutists who think we should ban the polio shot and the people who are 10 toes down for every vaccine, including the Covid vaccine, for all populations. He said he believed some vaccines are lifesaving. He said that it was “unlikely” that vaccines are the cause of autism but that nothing should be off-limits in terms of future studies. Bhattacharya also defended Kennedy, saying, “The idea that Bobby or President Trump is anti-vax is ridiculous.” I take issue with that, given Kennedy’s decades of public statements against vaccines.
Bhattacharya said he was supportive of the Covid vaccine for older people but didn’t think that there have been enough long-term studies on boosters to really understand the risk-benefit profile for younger Americans. He said he approved of the Food and Drug Administration’s new framework for approving Covid-19 vaccines for different populations.
They didn’t get into this kind of nitty-gritty on the podcast, but from the evidence I have seen, the new rules are already preventing some pregnant women, who may be more susceptible to severe illness, from getting the shots they want, even though they’re included under the new framework. That may be because Kennedy has said that pregnant women shouldn’t get the Covid shot, contradicting the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. (which, by the way, doesn’t seem to have an acting director). If the goal of this administration is to gain trust and reduce the confusion of Covid-era public health, it’s not going great.
Bhattacharya said to Huberman that he wanted to “create a culture of science focused on developing truth rather than obeying” hierarchies, but given his absurd defense of Kennedy on vaccines, I wouldn’t bet on his pushing back hard enough on his bosses. And I wish the folks in power, who now are the establishment, would be doing more to listen to their critics, rather than just flaming them on social media.
I found listening to the truly excellent podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” to be more of a heartening experience than my time with Bhattacharya, because it models a kind of deep, shared respect that seems almost impossible in our fractured age. “Why Should I Trust You?” is hosted by journalists and public health experts, and its promotional material says it is laser focused on the “breakdown in trust for science and public health.”
It has a series of episodes in which it brings together leaders of the Make America Healthy Again movement. While these episodes were a tough listen for me at some points (I wanted to throw my phone out the window when someone from MAHA Georgia tried to cast doubt on the germ theory of disease), they were also at times incredibly moving and instructive.
The idea I keep coming back to was put forward by Elizabeth Frost, who is a MAHA organizer from Ohio. She said in the May 20 episode: “I think there’s a very real issue with ‘they’ language in modern American politics, just broadly and generally saying ‘they’ did this or ‘they’ did that. Who’s ‘they’?” And she said that something MAHA adherents could be doing better is “being specific” about who they’re criticizing; often they’re talking about the pharmaceutical industry or lobbyists, and poorly paid public health researchers get swept into “they.”
Frost and others also made clear that some MAHA people do not support MAGA goals and that there is a wide range of vaccine beliefs among MAHA folks. This was, honestly, news to me, as most of the prominent MAHA influencers that end up in my social media feeds are also big Trump fans and very anti-vaccine.
Make no mistake: We are in a dire, depressing time for science and health in the United States. I’m not trying to “Kumbaya” my way out of this, pretending that if we all just hold hands, Kennedy’s disastrous leadership, combined with DOGE’s hacksaw won’t have long-lasting implications. They will. But I still think it matters to listen to individuals who are trying to reach the same goal of a healthier country in their own ways. There will always be disagreements, because that is how both science and public opinion work.
I asked Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who has been participating on the public health side of “Why Should I Trust You” conversations, what she’s learned from these discussions and what regular people can do to move the dialogue forward in their communities. “Realize that listening doesn’t mean agreeing with everything. It doesn’t mean abandoning evidence or the values that guide you,” she said. “It simply means understanding — truly understanding — what is driving people’s fears, frustrations, motivations, questions and hopes.” When the next health crisis happens, we’re going to need that kind of understanding if we want to bring our whole nation together.
End Notes
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Techno-anxiety: I really enjoyed this piece from Tom Scocca in New York magazine about tracking his sleep and the subjective feeling of being rested, compared with the ostensibly objective metrics of a tracker. I don’t track my sleep, but I use a Fitbit to track my steps and heart rate during waking hours. I find it alternatively instructive and maddening. Instructive: I could tell when I was getting Covid the last time because my heart rate was elevated during normal activity. Maddening: It gives me “cardio load” targets that are inscrutable to me and sometimes feel like a judgment — “You’ve been less active lately.” I’m tired. Leave me alone!
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post I Will Never Trust R.F.K. Jr. But I Want to Trust Public Health. appeared first on New York Times.
