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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. One of the ways government and life might change in the United States if Donald Trump is elected president is that RFK Jr., now officially part of Team Trump, is likely to get a top job running health policy. The New York Times published an op-ed piece yesterday by a doctor and health policy advocate called What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power. We'll talk to the writer of that article now, Dr. Rachel Bedard. The Times identifies her as a physician and that she writes about medicine and criminal justice. Beyond that, Dr. Bedard is a geriatrician and palliative care doctor. Beyond that, she was a doctor on Rikers Island for a long time, and then a member of the New York City Board of Corrections. She does have a current role in New York City politics as the finance chair for Zellnor Myrie's mayoral run. Myrie, for those of you who don't know, is the progressive state senator from Brooklyn who has already announced his primary challenge to Mayor Adams for next year, if Adams is still the mayor. We'll touch on some local issues, but talk mostly about her op-ed called What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power. Dr. Bedard, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Full disclosure, and if listeners haven't figured it out already, you're no fan of RFK Jr., but you do also have a bigger picture take on how COVID politicized beliefs on health policy that were not traditionally tied to any party identification. Can you start by describing where you think we are now on that scale and how different it is from the past?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Yes. The last four years have been this really critical era for public health in American history. This is not to say that this was the first politicized pandemic in recent history. The AIDS epidemic was obviously an incredibly contentious politicized event, inspired an amazing activist movement. COVID has been this very interesting period because after an initial period of unity amongst Americans in their fear and trust, or desire to trust the government's response to the pandemic, things got polarized quite quickly.

The way in which anti-vaccine sentiment became coded as right wing is really interesting. The way that belief around vaccination and feelings about mask mandates and all of those things became entrees into political activity. For a segment of the population who maybe previously were not particularly politically activated, that feels really new.

RFK has been this critical figure in that previously, a guy who was a self-identified Democrat, a liberal Democrat, who much of what he advocated for, like, clean water, was coded as a liberal priority, over this period of time, became a right-wing hero who has taken some of those same issues and brought them around to fit in with a right-wing agenda.

Brian Lehrer: Also on that, before we get to RFK Jr., more specifically, you write, "The fervor on the right about health and science inflames a similar tendency toward rigidity and dogma on the left. For each anti-vaccine post on X, a smug sign proclaiming, 'in this house, we think science is real' blooms in someone's yard." I can just hear many listeners already shouting at their radios now that that's a false equivalency. Thinking science is real is real. Being anti-vax requires you to not think science is real, but it is. Why did you frame rigidity and dogma on each side the way you did?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: First, I would say that science is real, but good science is self-critical. Science is the practice of hypothesis generation testing and then constant revision. rigidity is not actually a scientific principle. Believing that there are certain principles that are inviolable, that's not consistent with great science.

While we might believe that science is real, that's not the same thing, for example, as saying that there are never reasons that a person might not want to get a vaccine. There are always reasons that people may, in personal circumstances, have real doubts that need to be addressed. Public health, at its most successful, meets people where they are and helps invite them to make better choices in their lives or to participate in social contracts that keep us all healthy.

What happened in this era is, in response to what was already an incredibly polarized political environment and when there was such urgent and appropriate anti-Trump sentiment on the left, and that Trump was standing up and saying things like, you should inject bleach and take Ivermectin, the understandable reaction from people who already were very concerned about his leadership was to respond to any concern about public health principles and advice from certain characters like Anthony Fauci, as that any criticism was effectively representing the right-wing views.

That's not necessarily the case. Fauci is actually a really interesting example of this. RFK wrote a book about Fauci called The Real Anthony Fauci, in which Fauci is elevated into this world-historical villain as a character. In response, on the left, there are people who want to turn Fauci into a saint. Saint Fauci is like a meme, and you can buy merch [chuckles]. Neither of those characterizations is really appropriate, given who the guy actually was.

He was the head of the National Institute on Allergy and Immunology and Disease. This is a career science bureaucrat who was doing his best in a really difficult circumstance with a lot of uncertainty, who helped contribute to a lot of really important decisions, some of which turned out to be totally correct, and some of which, in hindsight, were probably pretty flawed. What you would want is to [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: In a complex way. I get it, but in Fauci's case, you would say any mistakes he made were done in good faith, which you probably can't say about Trump when he was talking about injecting bleach and trying to minimize COVID in the ways that he was, for the interest of his own reelection, or do you disagree?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: No, I would agree with that characterization, but I would also say that that agreement, the belief in Anthony Fauci's good faith should not be prerequisite for inviting someone in to participate in society. We want people to be able to get the vaccine, and regardless of whether or not they think Fauci was doing his best. You want to be able to decouple this idea that you have to be aligned with one team or the other from the way that people think about their own safety, their own behavior, how they take care of themselves, how they take care of their neighbors.

Brian Lehrer: Not to make this whole segment a retrospective of the COVID era debates, the height of the pandemic debates, but with one more follow up, you write in your op-ed that public health guidance is most effective when it's persuasive rather than prescriptive. You were just making that point, persuasive rather than prescriptive. You criticize some of the COVID era policies in that respect in hindsight.

I wonder if, coming from you, who essentially has written an anti-RFK Jr. as a health policy chief article here in The Times, would talk about that because, the other point of view about prescriptive would be that was a unique moment where we were at the height of a pandemic that wound up killing a million Americans and that there never was a vaccine mandate.

Nobody required one to get a vaccine, or doctors employed by the government were going house to house and forcing needles into your arms. It was that at the height of the pandemic when a million Americans were dying, if you wanted to be in certain mixed company situations, like kids in school or people in workplaces-

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Play in the NBA [chuckles].

Brian Lehrer: Thank you- that you had to be vaccinated in order to do that, or you had the choice of non-participation until the pandemic waned. Was that wrong?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: No. I want to be really clear that I do not think that was wrong. I was really supportive of New York City's vaccine mandates for New York City employees. I certainly was supportive of vaccine mandates for healthcare workers. I was supportive of a vaccine mandate for NBA players. I don't think that that was wrong. What I would say is those are asks of people that in order for people who might have hesitation to come in and meet that request, you want to have a lot of baseline trust established with them already.

What I would say is not that the mistake was on any level encouraging people and then sometimes strong-arming people by saying, you can't do your job anymore without this or whatever [crosstlalk]--

Brian Lehrer: In fairness, nobody was forced, but they were coerced.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Yes, they were certainly coerced.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of New York City public were fired when they refused to get vaccinated. Go ahead.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Right. I would say that vaccine hesitancy long predates the COVID pandemic and historically has been, has not been amongst, like, RFK YouTube grows. It's been in people in certain religious communities. Lots of communities of color have historically had higher rates of vaccine hesitancy for real reasons having to do with institutional mistrust, mistrust of public health for very good reasons. Against that backdrop, it's hard to ask people to do something that they have a hesitation about when you're, especially when you're asking them to do something like put a substance into their body.

The mistakes, to me, were less around that specific request or similarly, a rule that you had to wear a mask in a certain place or whatever, and more about the way in which the surrounding discourse and communication did not beat the [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Can polarize and [unintelligible 00:13:11].

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Yes, did not beat the momentum in inviting people in and inviting people to trust institute to overcome some of that distrust, in part in a funny way, because some of that communication was overly certain from the beginning, when actually we were in a period where we didn't know very much.

For example, at the beginning of COVID, I'm sure you remember, there was a lot of weird stuff about masks. Initially, there was this message that you shouldn't wear masks because we needed to save them for healthcare workers, and it was totally unnecessary and the virus wasn't airborne. Then it was, oh, actually, you do need to wear a mask. Wait, wear this cloth mask, and then you can't. Actually it is airborne. and we were totally wrong about that.

When there is a disconnect between people's real experience of their lives and what they're being told, if they're being told something that feels like it's not reflective of their experience, but they're being told it with a huge amount of authoritative expertise, and then that expertise turns out to be wrong, it's hard for them to buy into the next round of communication.

Brian Lehrer: Even though a lot of that represented what you laid out as what science really is, which is a constant act of learning and experimenting and so revising what knowledge appears to be based on more experience. For example, that it was airborne after all, so that masks were relevant after all. It wasn't just some power politics changing that message. With all of that as prelude [chuckles] and if you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Rachel Bedard, who has a New York Times op-ed called What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power.

Now to the prospect of RFK Jr. in charge of a federal health agency. People know generally, in the simplest of terms, he's anti-vax. You tell us in this article that recently he's become a vocal proponent of the benefits of raw milk, that is, milk that hasn't been pasteurized to protect against pathogens. Would you like to give our listeners the quick pasteurization 101 that you give readers in the article?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Sure. Pasteurization, like vaccination, I say in the article, on the great public health success stories. It's a process by which dairy products undergo some processing in order to make sure that they are not hospitable environments for bacteria. If you do not do this, there are certain types of bacteria that thrive and grow in dairy mediums.

Although it is relatively rare in terms of absolute numbers of cases, there are cases every year of people who get very, very sick, and there are some number of deaths because they become infected with a bad bacteria from drinking raw milk or eating unpasteurized cheese or yogurt. This year especially, that has been a prominent concern for two reasons.

One, there is this movement to- there are raw milk truthers who insist that raw milk has higher nutritional benefits than pasteurized milk. This is not the case. That is not true at all. Pasteurization does not do anything to the nutritional content of milk. However, people who believe this have made it a cardinal health practice for them that they're only drinking raw milk. That is something that's been proselytized, especially by right-wing stars like Tucker Carlson. RFK himself says that he now only drinks raw milk.

Their assertion is that pasteurization is part of a larger conspiracy between big agriculture and public health and government regulation to both undermine your individual health and take away your choices.

Brian Lehrer: You note that his policy goal there is to make sure raw milk is available to people who want it. I guess the question becomes, is that choice at a policy level such a bad thing? Pasteurized milk would presumably still be available, too. If raw milk turns out to be dangerous, then after a few tragedies, that would get a lot of media attention. Even that might be something policy should prevent, but let's say there was that guaranteed availability that Kennedy wants, and then some people died from milk that wasn't pasteurized because it got contaminated in those ways, people would get what quackery that is. Are you against choice in the way that he frames it?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: No. I'm actually not against choice, exactly, although I am against it in the way that he frames it, and I'll make that distinction. There are circumstances in which it might be entirely reasonable to consume raw dairy. A lot of the risk of bacteria has to do, as far as I understand it, although I'm not a farmer, with how the milk is handled and processed and stored, et cetera, et cetera, after, I guess, you milk the cow.

If you were like at a known farm where you knew what their processes were and you had a lot of trust, it might be totally reasonable to eat raw dairy from that farm and presume that you're not going to get sick. You can certainly travel to other countries where they serve unpasteurized cheese and enjoy that. People do that without any hesitation. There are circumstances under which giving people that choice is totally, seems totally reasonable to me.

What is problematic about the way that RFK frames it is that he sets up making that choice available, one, as a system wide intervention, that means that you wouldn't have that same specific hold on the origin of the milk that you were drinking, et cetera, et cetera, necessarily. Two, it's a system wide intervention that he posits as like a reaction to big government and pharma and agriculture trying to prevent you from getting this.

The problem with that is not just that it's incorrect, but that you're assuming, Brian, in the way that you described that, that a couple of bad cases would turn people off of doing this, but we're in a little bit of a post truth era here where the polarization might outweigh people's judgment. You can imagine that, say that happens and there are a few terrible tragedies and there are people who die from listeria the next year when raw milk goes on the market, your hope is that people would say, oh, actually, we're not going to drink that anymore, but in fact, in the current context, I don't know that that's what would happen, because leadership in this health freedom movement, that RFK is the de facto head of tells people those cases are- gives people a frame--

Brian Lehrer: They didn't really die. They didn't really die from the bacteria in the raw milk.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: They didn't really die. [crosstalk] You're being lied to about why. This is so rare and this is the circumstance that they're lying to you about how it happened or whatever it is, or it's so much healthier for you to drink this raw milk that it's worth the risk. There are all of these ways in which the news and information is being filtered through all this [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: They won't even see the real news in their information bubbles.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Right, exactly. That's why the interesting thing to me, or amongst other interesting things about RFK as a character, is much of what he says, if it wasn't in the context and the language in which he expresses it, brings up things that have a kernel of truth to them. Are there really complicated and potentially concerning relationships between big pharma and government regulation? Definitely. There's lots of reasons to be concerned about the FDA approval process, for example.

The way that he speaks about that is with this paranoid conspiracist attitude that is like, this is a cabal of elites who are conspiring to keep you unhealthy and poisoned. That's really, really dangerous as a framework to give people to understand really nuanced issues.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls on the premise of Dr. Rachel Bedard's New York Times op-ed, What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power. Word is that the deal that he probably made with Donald Trump in order to throw in with the Trump campaign is that if Trump is elected, he would get some powerful position over health policy; Secretary of health and Human Services, or something like that. Call with your questions, comments.

I don't want to spend too much time in this segment rehashing the debates of the COVID era of 2020 to 2021, if what I mean. We're getting some calls who want to continue that thread. I want to look more to the future and the prospect of what would happen if Trump, or for that matter, Kamala Harris, is elected with respect to public health and public health policy. 212-433-WNYC with Dr. Rachel Bedard. 212-433-9692.

Before we take a break and take some calls, I want to play you a clip of RFK Jr., which revolves around one of his main concerns that you just cited. That's fair to some degree, and that is undue influence over health policy by the pharmaceutical industry. This, as you said, is traditionally concerned more of the left. How many times have we heard Bernie Sanders, for example, rail against big pharma? Here's an example from an RFK video on Facebook of how he thinks they got over on us on Obamacare.

RFK Jr.: Something changed during Obamacare, and that was that the Obama administration and my uncle Ted Kennedy, was chairing a Senate health committee at this time, so I watched this whole thing very, very carefully and was disturbed at that time, because of the lobbying power of pharma, Obama could not get Obamacare passed without the cooperation of the pharmaceutical industry. He basically had to make a golden handshake with the devil.

The agreement they made was that, number one, Obamacare is going to benefit you because it's going to pay for all of your products, the pharmaceutical drugs to Americans, but here was the key. We will not bargain over prices with you.

Brian Lehrer: We will not bargain over prices with you. RFK Jr. from a recent video on Facebook. Anything there to fact-check, Dr. Bedard, or give an opposing point of view on?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Golden handshake with the devil is a little hyperbolic. There are lots of different stakeholders in the passage of the ACA. The insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical lobby were certainly at the table, and their business interests are reflected in what was ultimately passed. That is perfectly fair to say.

What I would fact-check is the global tone of that critique, which is to make the ACA sound like it was a concession to corporate interest, when, in fact, the ACA was an unbelievably progressive, lifesaving piece of legislation, the most important thing that's been passed in the last 20 years in American politics in terms of its power to increase healthcare access to millions and millions of Americans and save their lives.

Brian Lehrer: Although people like Bernie Sanders were out there at the time and would probably still say the reason we have Obamacare, that allows private healthcare, marketplace, though it's regulated and subsidized, and not Medicare for all or some single payer system, is because the various parts of big medicine, big pharma, big insurance, et cetera, had too much influence over Congress and Obama could never have gotten it passed.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: As a lifelong single-payer advocate, do I agree that I wish that we had different government-sponsored universal healthcare in this country? I certainly do, but politics is the art of the possible, and the ACA is what was able to be passed at that time. There are really complicated reasons why. Any critique that reduces it to a golden handshake between the Obama administration and corporate interest, is really blurring the details of how we got here.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Dr. Bedard. We'll start taking your calls. We have another clip from that RFK Jr. video for her to respond to and other things that he's advocating that would probably or could come to pass if Trump is elected and he's given a health policy position like that's in her article, like ceasing funding for infectious disease research. We'll continue with Dr. Bedard and you right after this.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Dr. Rachel Bedard, author of a New York Times op-ed now called What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power. Among other things, she's also got a New York City political public health role. She was a doctor on Rikers Island for a long time and then a member of the New York City Board of Corrections. She has a lot to say about healthcare on Rikers. Maybe we'll get to some of that. She does have a current role in New York City politics as the finance chair for Zellnor Myrie, State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn's mayoral campaign. Maybe we'll get to some of that, but really, we're talking about the premise of her op-ed, what to expect if RFK Jr. attains a position of health policy power under a President Donald Trump. Let's take a phone call. Olivia in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Dr. Bedard. Hello.

Olivia: Hi. I'm really enjoying the conversation. Thank you for taking my call. To preface, I largely agree and appreciate with what Dr. Pedarda said. I do think an RFK-run health ministry would be a total disaster. I identify as a leftist. I'm very opposed to the far right. I'm very anti-Trump, and I am pro-vax. That said, I am a raw milk drinker. I'm not calling to get into its health benefits.

I'm more interested in bringing up the idea of how, as soon as anything is touched by the far right or becomes a far-right signifier, it suddenly becomes totally untouchable and abhorred by the left, regardless of whether whatever that is might be worth exploring, regardless of whether there might be a kernel of truth there. I totally concede that regardless of whether or not there is a kernel of truth, it's often these issues are totally perverted and leveraged by the far right to galvanize their base to their own ends. I think Naomi Klein puts it really well in her book, Doppelganger.

I also want to say I was recently reading The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour. He has some statistics where there's an anonymous survey of scientists, and some 14% are aware of other scientists who have fudged their own numbers. I was just wondering if you would like to weigh in on that.

Brian Lehrer: A very informed listener reading Doppelganger, reading The Twittering Machine.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: I know. I'm like, Olivia, hello.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: We'll have to hire her as a producer. Dr. Bedard, go ahead.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Yes. Well, Olivia, first, you possibly better than the op-ed, just summarized exactly the argument, which is are there lots of things that people do or want to do that may carry health risks but also for various reasons people want to do them either because they believe they have health benefits or for other reasons. People use drugs, people have unsafe sex, people ride without seatbelts. There are lots and lots and lots of things that we would advise people not to do, that people do anyway.

What you said is exactly right, which is what is wild and dangerous about the moment that we're in is all of those questions are getting spun around in the political discourse and polarized in a way where we end up jumping over the substance of the conversation we want to have about them. Instead, we try to identify like, what is my team's orientation to this question?

Now, just as you said, raw milk has become something that the right champions and the left rejects. That, is exactly the danger of this moment. RFK is such a dangerous figure because in a very cynical way, he really capitalizes on those dynamics to increase his own prominence and power in the ecosystem.

Brian Lehrer: Olivia, let me ask you one follow-up question. A lot of what we're talking about here is that weird point at which the alternative health industry skeptical naturopath movement, if I can frame it that way, meets the MAGA right. You maybe are on the left side of that. You can reject that label if you want to, but it's weird. For totally different reasons, the alternative health left and MAGA right are on the same page in some ways. How does that feel to you?

Olivia: As I said, I'm reading Doppelganger. Naomi Klein calls them diagonalists, the people who maybe were once leftists and now find themselves on the far right. I reject the far right, but she like puts it better than I can in her book about how this happens. I maybe think that part of it is to do with what Dr. Bedard was saying about how saying things like, in this house, we believe science, is like a signifier-

Brian Lehrer: Just shuts down the conversation.

Olivia: -when in reality-- Exactly, yes, it shuts down the conversation when in reality good science should be self-critical. A lot of people, yes, just totally [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: They look at nuamce.

Olivia: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: You feel stuck. Olivia, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you. Please call us again. Great call. Here on this notion of where the alternative left meets the MAGA right, Dr. Bedard, here's another listener chiming in in a text. Listener writes, "Could the argument be made that the left is more concerned about big pharma taking advantage of people in need by raising the price, and the far right is concerned about big government taking away options that they think corporations and business will create for them?"

Then this listener gives their opinion, which is, "Never has a large corporation made the right choice to protect people without government oversight, like health inspections." That point by that listener actually brings me to another question that I wanted to ask you. Talking about the prospect of RFK in a health policy role, there's a duality here with RFK Jr. throwing in with the MAGA Republicans that we haven't touched on yet.

One of their other central concerns, the MAGA rights central concerns and goals is weakening the administrative state, as they call it, which, of course, does what? It sets health policy regulations. Can he be against big pharma but also be against regulating them? It doesn't make sense, but it seems to be where Trump is is at where RFK is, if you know.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: I quoted in the piece yesterday that Pete Buttigieg, in a conversation with Ezra Klein last week, had referred to the RFK MAGA axis as post policy, which I thought was a really apt term for what they do, which is they talk in big, vague ways about how you can't trust anybody. You can't trust the corporate interests that are trying to make you sick, but you also can't trust the government regulators who are in bed with them and who are motivated by their own elite concerns. You can trust us. We'll figure it out. We're aligned with you. We will speak truth to power. We'll take care of it.

You're bringing up exactly the right kinds of questions, which are, these are real tensions that exist now between how much regulation is too much regulation, what is that regulation trying to achieve? Under what circumstances are regulators potentially in hoc or captured by corporate interest? That certainly is a concern that has been pervasive on the left for a long time. What are the right self-policing mechanisms in public health to prevent that or address it when you see it?

None of what RFK talks about gets at that complexity. All of it is basically, as you have correctly identified, like we're going to get rid of the establishment in all of its different institutional guises, and instead we're going to do something that is a little bit back to nature [chuckles]. There's all of this imagined return to like a purer state of the body in the way that he talks about things. How we get there, what it looks like, what the tradeoffs are, none of that comes up in the way that he talks about this.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. We're running out of time and there are so many more things that I would like to do. I have another RFK Jr. clip from that Facebook post about big pharma that I want to play now. I'm not sure we'll get to it. I have another policy position of his that you cite in the article. I also want to take Joe in Yonkers, and I'm going to do that. Joe and Yonkers, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling it.

Joe: Yes, thank you. I just feel that, as a public radio station and, we expend so much gray matter and time and effort to rebut these ridiculous claims are the far right, the MAGAs, and in doing so, they get to frame the issues and set the agenda. It's a big waste of time. Instead of trying to counter their falsehoods, which we all now know-- How many times does a person have to be lied to to know that the person who's delivering the lies is [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: But we don't all now know it, Joe. I'm going to give you another say, but this is the line that we try to walk all the time. When do you not give oxygen to lies? When have they become so entrenched in the public's mind that we have an obligation to address lies and debug them and call them out? It's a gray zone. We're struggling with which things to ignore, which things to take up every single day.

When something like this has gotten this far and RFK Jr. has just canceled his own campaign to throw in with Trump for exactly these reasons, that's why Dr. Bedard wrote an op-ed what to expect if RFK Jr. becomes a health policymaker. Yes, Dr. Bedard, did you want to add to that?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Yes. The thing that I wanted to add to that is there's a real reason that it was important to Trump to bring RFK aboard. That's because the constituency that RFK now leads is a not-insignificant voting bloc. They have an outsized presence in social media, and they have captured a lot of people who might have been undecided voters or independents or even Democrats, but who have, in the past four years, become negatively polarized against Democrats and who follow what RFK said. Although I agree with you, Joe, that giving these ideas airtime feels silly, if these ideas strike you as patently false and silly, that's not how they strike a huge number of Americans. Those Americans may end up determining the outcome of a November election.

Brian Lehrer: Joe, you get one more go.

Joe: Well, I respectfully disagree that, yes, but it is as if these were the only issues to be discussed. There are very important health issues to be discussed, real ones in search of real solutions, not the made-up ones.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. I would just say that.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Oh, that, I agree with you.

Brian Lehrer: We do that, too, all the time. Sometimes you can't let the lie put on its shoes and go around the world, as the saying goes, without addressing it to some degree, if it's developed enough influence. I hope we strike the right balance of when to ignore and when to highlight. That is up to you, Joe, and that is up to all the listeners, but I don't think that the answer is zero addressing of those things because I don't think that's in the public interest.

Before we run into time, I'm not going to play another RFK clip. Joe will probably like that, but one more thing that you wrote that RFK Jr. has spoken about. He says he would cease funding for infectious disease research and he would accuse the editors of the major medical journals of publishing fake science at the behest of industry. Just very briefly, in fact, if you could do this in about 30 seconds, because we have to get to our next guest, but what does the field of infectious disease research include and what, in your opinion, would end funding for it endanger?

Dr. Rachel Bedard: It would endanger tons of things, among them any effort of pandemic prevention. There is no reason to think that COVID was our last pandemic. RFK's position is that the focus of his health leadership would be on chronic disease and not chronic disease treatment, but chronic disease prevention. Certainly, is that a critically important, and I probably understudied field, sure, but the idea, again, the way that he politicizes that, is to say that it's being understudied because we are over-focusing on infectious disease, because infectious disease leads to lucrative antibiotic and vaccine development for pharma.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Rachel Bedard's New York Times op-ed is called What to Expect if R.F.K. Jr. Is Promoted to a Position of Power. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Dr. Rachel Bedard: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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