Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/17/23 EXCLUSIVE: RFK JR. IN STUDIO INTERVIEW On Abortion, Political Family Dynasties, Border Crisis, Nuclear Energy, Vaccine Debate, and MORE

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Krystal and Saagar bring you an exclusive interview with RFK Jr. in studio on his presidential campaign. We ask him questions on Abortion, the Border crisis, Climate Change, Nuclear Energy, Krystal has a fiery debate on Vaccines, his thoughts on political family dynasties, and much more.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. We're very excited to be joined by Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. He is an author, an activist, and a presidential candidate. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. It's our pleasure. So one of our goals here, sir, is we know you've been doing quite a bit of interviews. We would like to treat you seriously as a presidential candidate. We want to get to some things which we haven't seen you touch on before. We know some of the issues that animate you the most. We won't leave those to the side. We want to make sure that we get as much ground as possible.

So our first question is actually a very basic one. Why do you think that you should be president? Well, you know, I'm running because I'm disturbed about the direction our country is going in. Not only our country, but my political party. And it really culminated during my unease with what's happening, culminated during the pandemic when I saw all of this kind of almost like an orchestrated assault on the Bill of Rights that suddenly it was okay to censor speech, particularly criticism of the government, which has always been the purview of American citizenship.

And then they went after freedom of worship. They closed every church in our country for a year with no scientific citation, no democratic process, no notice and comment rulemaking. They went after jury trials so that we can no longer, which are guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment in any case or controversy exceeding $25. Americans are entitled to jury trials if somebody harms you. But suddenly you couldn't sue vaccine companies or pharmaceutical companies or any kind of medical provider, no matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless their conduct, no matter how grievous your injury. They went after property rights. They closed the Fifth Amendment right to due process and just compensation. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.

They went after the Fourth Amendment to our prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures was just left by the wayside as we encountered all of these kind of intrusive government mandates where you couldn't essentially leave your home without showing your private medical records etc and you know I personally was subject to a lot of the censorship, but more disturbing. Mothers who had injured children, people who said they suffered or felt that they had suffered injuries from the vaccines, doctors who wanted to provide medical advice on early treatments were all banished from the Internet. And, you know, it started becoming a country that I didn't recognize.

My own political party was at the forefront of that, the spear tip of those moves. And our party suddenly became the party of censorship, the party of pharmaceutical companies, the party of fear, and now the party of war. So let me ask you a little bit about that, because we've both watched a lot of interviews of you and, you know, both on a general interest, but also to prepare for this interview and sitting down with you. And I think some of the key issues that you tend to focus on are COVID, the Ukraine war and censorship. Those are all issues where you seem to be in basic agreement with the former president, Donald Trump. So I'd love for you to lay out what do you see as some of the most critical

differences you have with the former president? Well, I have a lot of not only issues, differences, but stylistic differences. I think my approach to people and politics is very different. I'd say, you know, in terms of issues, probably the biggest departure is on the environment. And in fact, you know, my first encounter with Donald Trump is that I sued him twice, you know, in the years before he was president to block his construction of golf courses, two golf courses, which I successfully did, in the New York City watershed.

But on all of the environmental issues, I think my worldview is very different than the president's. You know, I'm happy to talk about any of the other issues. What about the current president? So when you, obviously, are running against an incumbent president, I was thinking a little bit about your father. He decided to run in 1968. He said he wanted to save the party from LBJ, from the chaos of Vietnam. You're running against an incumbent president as well.

Is there a similarity there? Like, what do you want to save America from Joe Biden from? What exact? Well, you know, the forever wars, you know, which which was really kind of a Republican issue. And it's it's flipped. Oh, you know, there are many I think there are many more Republicans who are skeptical about this war. We should be making peace around the world. We should be projecting economic power rather than military power the same way that the Chinese do. And, you know, instead, we, you know, the war is now our major industry. And weapons are one of our largest exports.

And that's, you know, I mean, that's the inverse of everything that America was supposed to represent to the world. My uncle, President Kennedy, said when he was asked by one of his best friends, one of his two best friends, Ben Bradley, who is the publisher of The Washington Post, asked him what he wanted on his gravestone. And he said he kept the peace. And when Bradley asked him about that, he said he felt that the principal job of a president was to keep the country out of war. My uncle had been in World War II. He lost his brother in World War II. His father was adamantly against, had opposed World War I. As ambassador to England, he had tried to keep the country out of war.

This is before we knew about Hitler's atrocities. The final solution didn't begin until 1943. But my grandfather believed that the best strategy for the United States, there's a famous historian called Paul Kennedy who has no relationship to me. He's a Yale historian. He did this very influential book on the declines of empires. And he went through all of the empires in the last 500 years and shows that each one of them destroyed itself, cannibalized itself by overextending its military abroad. And my

grandfather knew that. My grandfather had nine kids. He could not bear, he could not conceive of an issue that would be worth the sacrifice of his child. My own son fought in the Ukraine war in the Kharkiv offensive. He joined without telling us. He went over to the Ukraine, joined the Foreign Legion, and he fought as a machine gunner for a special forces unit. But I can't conceive the, you know, the grief that I would feel if I lost my son in that conflict. Ukrainian parents who have lost their children and maybe as many as 70 or 80,000 Russian parents, which is something that I don't think we should be happy about, that we should be celebrating. The war is bad for us from a geopolitical standpoint. We shouldn't be pushing Russia and China together. And we went to that war for the right reasons, out of compassion for the best of American character and virtues,

and compassion for the Ukrainian people who were victimized by an illegal and brutal war invasion by the Russians. But it ceased at some point being a humanitarian mission and it became an agenda, a geopolitical agenda to exhaust Russia, to do regime change with Vladimir Putin, which is the opposite of humanitarian impulse. Sure.

And they've been out front, you know, up front about that at times. They've admitted that it's the goal. Yeah. One quibble with you, I've seen you mention this 300,000 Ukrainian deaths number a couple of times, and I wasn't able to find, can you tell us, where's that number come from?

That was, I forget the name of that, it's the commander of the Ukrainian forces. And it was in his conversation with the NATO commander, which was publicized. Because we saw in the leaked documents it was- I believe that's correct. But I will provide you with that citation. Yeah, I'd love to see, because we looked beforehand and weren't able to see that. There were different numbers in the leaked documents, so we just want to be accurate. Well, I'll get you that because we looked beforehand and wasn't weren't able to see different numbers from the leaked documents We just want to be accurate. Well, let me you know, I'll get I'll get you that today. That'd be great. Thank you, sir

Um, so day one agenda. What are the priorities? The priorities on day one will be partnering Julian Assange and And then starting to fix NIH, FDA, CDC, you know, get them off of the you know, their subsistence relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and unraveling that agency capture, putting the right people in that agency who know how to do that. And is that just a matter of different personnel or do you need to have a public option for pharmaceutical companies? Do you need to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry? What does that actually look like? No, I don't think that's the right thing. I think we need to get pharmaceutical money out of the regulatory agencies. NIH personnel should

not be able to collect royalties on pharmaceutical products that they worked on, which they can do today. NIH has devolved from being a research agency that's supposed to be improving American health. And instead, it's become an incubator for pharmaceutical products. So they develop initial pharmaceutical products in their lab. And then they farm that product out to a university and they give the universities hundreds of millions of dollars to go through phase one and phase two trials. And then they bring in a pharmaceutical company if the drug works,

which they almost always do because they can make them look like they work. And then they bring in a pharmaceutical company to do the phase three, which is very, very expensive, may cost a billion dollars. And along the way, everybody gets a piece of the patent. So NIH gets a piece of the patent. For example, NIH owns half the Moderna patent. And, you know, there's been billions and billions of dollars, maybe $100 billion so far on that platform, on that mRNA platform that NIH developed. And NIH stands to collect half of that money. Not only that, but individuals within NIH,

you know, the deputies of Anthony Fauci, have margin rights on that patent. So they can collect $150,000 a year for life and then their children and so on, as long as that product's being sold. And what that means is that the regulatory function of the agency is subsumed by these, you know, the mercantile ambitions of these regulators who are no longer regulators. Isn't the profit motive, though, at the core of that problem? Because the problem you're describing isn't unique to FDA, NIH, et cetera.

You can go down, I know you would talk about the EPA, you probably have direct experience there as an environmental lawyer, but you can go down the list of these agencies and you see the way the revolving door works. You see the way that there's a lot of industry capture because ultimately, you know, we have a health insurance industry and a hospital industry and a pharmaceutical industry that has the bottom line is the bottom line. Isn't that really the root of the problem here? Well, do you mean human nature? I mean the profit motive. I mean putting the profit motive above health. The profit motive is human nature.

So in a democracy, the challenge is how do you insulate public institutions from the human impulse for greed and acquisition, you know, acquisitiveness. And that's really, to me, that's the solution is you get the money, you know, half of FDA's budget, almost half of FDA's budget comes from pharma. And so, you know, they're not really working for the public interest. They're working for the pharmaceutical companies. CDC buys about $5 billion worth of vaccines a year from pharmaceutical industries in secret deals with, you know, that are sweetheart

deals that benefit those companies, a product that CDC has previously approved and mandated mandated effectively and and then CDC then is Under a you know under pressure and to to make sure everybody takes those products and to not find problems with those products if problems arise You want the regulator to be the first one to notice and? So we have we have a system that is being corroded by conflicts of interest. Yes. And some of these issues— And you want to remove those conflicts of interest as much as you can. You'll never get rid of all of them, but you want to remove as much. And it's really like agency capture

on steroids now because the conflicts are so rife and pervasive. And the U.S. health care system is uniquely good in certain respects in terms of advanced treatments, et cetera, but uniquely bad in a lot of other respects in terms of, you know, chronic illnesses and the expense. I mean, we pay way more for health care than other developed nations and we get way less. As you know, every other developed nation in the world has universal health care. Do you support universal health care through a Medicare for all program or something similar? My you know, my my I would say my my highest ambition would be to have a single payer program, which, you know, with. And people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that.

But to have a single payer program that is available to everybody, I don't know how politically realistic that is. But, you know, if you ask me, if I were designing the system from the beginning, that's what I would do. You're right. The system now is broken. We take, you know, we pay the most for health care in the world. I think we're 79th. We're behind, like, Costa Rica and Cuba in terms of health outcomes. And we take, you know, we pay the most for health care in the world. I think we're 79th. We're behind like Costa Rica and Cuba in terms of health outcomes.

We have the highest level of chronic disease in the world of any country. You know, that means neurological diseases, autoimmune diseases, allergic diseases like peanut allergies, food allergies, eczema, anaphylaxis, asthma. And we pay more than anybody else. We also consume more pharmaceutical products. I think we take three to four times as many drugs per capita than Europeans do. And they're not making us healthier. The third largest cause of death in this country after cancer and heart attacks is now pharmaceutical drugs. Americans are the sickest country in the world.

This is the sickest generation we've ever had. And we spend $4.3 trillion on health care every year. 80% of that goes to treating chronic disease. And to me, the worst, you know, the most alarming metric, when I was a boy, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Today, by 2006, 54%. And, you know, I'm sure it's gone up since then. I mean, half our children are debilitated for life from a chronic disease.

And you know, the pharmaceutical industry is making a lot of money on that, selling us the EpiPens, the albuterol inhalers, the anti-seizure medication, the insulin shots and all that. And they're making a killing. They make, you know, half a trillion dollars a year. But it's not good for our country. And what we need is public health agencies that are actually focused on public health rather than advancing the pharmaceutical paradigm and profits for these pharmaceutical companies.

It's interesting to me. I heard you talk a lot about corruption. We were talking here about the profit motive. I was surprised, though, you did the interview with the All In podcast. I knew that you were against nuclear power, but you were talking about something interesting, saying that we should have effectively a completely free market energy system. And I guess I wanted to talk with somebody whose father and uncle famously supported major public initiatives, which didn't necessarily pay out, but would yielded massive dividends in the future. Why should nuclear, solar, wind, or any power, honestly, float outside of public support

systems if the overall social benefit of it unlocks economic potential? I'm just curious for the objection on the cost alone. I think the market is – here's the thing. We don't have free market capitalism. Let me just say that. Or free market energy, right? That's what I'm surprised. Yeah. We have – the energy – the rules that come in the energy industry are written by the incumbents to benefit the to uh to benefit the the dirtiest filthiest

most poisonous most toxic most warmongering feels from hell rather than the cheap clean green wholesome and uh and you know efficient feels from habit in a true free market true free market promotes efficiency efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste. A true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources, and it is the undervaluation of those resources that cause us to use them wastefully. In a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, without enriching your community. What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor.

They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for the rest of us, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. When a coal company burns coal and sells it, for example, in North Carolina, 16 cents a kilowatt hour. We have the, or two cents in the evening. We have this sense that we're getting the cheapest energy possible.

But that coal generation is poisoning every freshwater fish in America with mercury. So they're externalizing that cost, which is a cost on all Americans. They have sterilized every lake on the high peaks of the Appalachian from Georgia to northern Quebec. That's a cost of coal that they don't tell you about. There's half a trillion dollars a year in asthma attacks, pulmonary and respiratory illnesses associated with ozone particulates from those emissions. That's a cost that they should be forced to internalize. I don't think there's any debate here I'm more focusing on nuclear thinking I agree with all your criticisms Which is why you know

I believe very much in a nuclear power future and that's where I was surprised to hear you say that We shouldn't pursue a nuclear future and said go in the direction of wind and solar where we don't seem to have the same level of renewable energy production and actual efficiency if we look at the way the amount of power that we can get out of these systems when they are properly constructed. I will concede a lot of the problems with the prior system. Let me say at the outset, the problem with variable power like wind and solar is not that we don't have the generation. We have enough generation from wind just in Montana, Texas, and North Dakota alone to power 100 percent of the North American energy grid. And we could power all of North America with a – by putting panels, PVC panels on an area 75 miles by 75 miles in the desert southwest.

The problem is we can't transport the energy. Yeah, we don't have lines. We don't have batteries. Let me just get to the nuke issue. First of all, I think we should continue to explore nuclear power. And I'm all for nuclear power if you can ever make it safe and efficient. It's not safe. And if it were safe, they wouldn't – they would get an insurance policy. They can't – it's not – it's not a bunch of hippies in tie-dy Lloyds of London that says – who are saying your industry is so risky that we will not even consider writing you an insurance policy. sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night and pass the Price-Anderson Act,

which immunizes all these plants from their own accountability. So if the Indian Point Power Plant blows up and irradiates all of the homes in Westchester County, New York, and Connecticut, and everybody in New York City makes New York City unpopulated, unpopulable for the next 50 or 60 years. Who pays for that? It's not Con Edison. It's not the people who run the plant. The plant is inside. It's just like the vaccine companies do not have to pay for the consequences of their recklessness.

The company has no real incentive to make it safe because they're not liable for injuries they got. And by the way, if you look at the cost from Fukushima, Indian Point is still leaking tritium every day into the Hudson River. Fukushima, if you look at Fukushima, anybody can go and Google the water wastewater tanks of Fukushima, if you look at Fukushima, there are, you know, anybody can go and Google the water, wastewater tanks of Fukushima. There's so much radiation going into the Pacific that they now, the only way of dealing with it is building water tank after water tank. And they go all the way to the horizon.

And, you know, and you look at what happened at chernobyl so but ultimately the ultimate arbiter of risk is the insurance industry and the insurance industry is saying that in the nuclear industry is too is too risky for us to insure now is it economic? No. The last, I think, two plants built, one of them cost $9 billion per gigawatt. The other cost $16 billion per gigawatt. A solar plant costs $1 billion a gigawatt, and then you get free fuel forever. So the wind and the sun are free. A wind plant costs about $1.1, $ 1.2 billion a gigawatt. A nuke plant is 15 times what a wind or solar plant does. And the nuke plant, people say, well, it's variable outage, variable power.

You're not getting the power all the time. The same with a nuke plant. The nuke plant have outages all the time. They want to run at 91% capacity. I don't want to spend too much time here necessarily going through this because okay well but i understand i understand your objection let me just say one other cause what the big cause is storing the waste which has to be stored for 30,000 years which is five times the length of recorded human history if you had to internally and no

there's no utility on earth that. We'll build a nuclear power plant unless it essentially is fully subsidized, a massive subsidies. And I don't think that's a, you know, good way to allocate public resources. So part of, part of the argument in favor of nuclear energy that even a lot of environmental activists have come around to at this moment is that the potential consequences of climate change are so dire that even though they recognize some of the risks and the problems, especially the, you know, what do you do with the waste issue that you're pointing to here? The thought is, OK, but this is the tech we have and climate change has these dire consequences we're already living through. So what I want to hear from you is, you know, what is your

view of the climate crisis and what is your view of Joe Biden's reaction to that crisis? Do you think he's done too much, too little, or he's been about right? Well, let me, you know, let me just comment on your first question. If I'm not saying that we shouldn't spend money to avert, you know, climate or, you know, to have a cleaner air. Well, why wouldn't you take the cheapest way of doing that? You know, and nuclear energy promised us at the outset that they were going to be too cheap to meter. This is what they've been saying for 60 years. Right. And instead, they've given us the most expensive way to boil a pot of water that has ever been

devised by humanity. Why would you have the most expensive solution when there is cheaper solutions, far, far cheaper solutions out there? What do you think of Joe Biden with the so-called Inflation Reduction Act? There have been a lot of subsidies put into solar and wind in particular to try to move towards a clean energy future. Do you think he's done enough? Do you think he's done too much?

What do you make of his record? Well, you know, the problem is I think that, you know, energy ought to be able to stand on its own. It's okay for a nation to subsidize a new industry for national security reasons or to greenhouse an industry that you want to, you know, that you want to become self-sufficient with. So I think there are really good reasons to subsidize industries,

particularly in their nascent stages. But it gets more difficult when you're subsidizing mature industries. The problem with the market is that the carbon industry is so heavily subsidized. I think the IMF or the World Bank estimates that the subsidies to the carbon industry are about $5.2 trillion a year globally. And so that sends a signal out that distorts the whole marketplace. So instead of choosing the cheapest energy, we're now having to subsidize the competitors to bring them up. Don't disagree with you there.

But just I'm trying to get a sense of, I mean, what is your view of the climate crisis and what level of investment is worth, you know, putting in to deal with it? Do you see it as an existential threat? What is your view there? I think, I believe that climate is a existential threat there, but I don't insist other people believe that. And one of the problems with the climate crisis, and let me tell you, because on the areas of vaccines and public health and a lot of environmental issues, I, you know, have made myself an expert the way that attorneys always do when they're arguing a case. I understand the science. I can read the science critically. I cannot do that with climate science. So I'm left kind of taking other people's word. I think most people are in the same situation.

We're all basically saying, okay, 99% of the scientists are saying, and the public science, are saying this is – the climate crisis is existential and it is being created by anthropogenic carbon production. I can't independently verify that. But the reason I believe it, because and I also know, particularly the past three years, people, you know, we've seen how science, particularly federally funded science, can be corrupted. And this is what the critics of, you know, that sort of the Republican right is saying. We don't believe anything that federal science says anymore. And I can't go to them like I can with vaccines or pharmaceuticals or other environmental issues and say, you're wrong. And I can explain to you exactly why you're wrong. I can't do that. But I have seen in the 19, you know, these documents in the 1970s were Exxon's own science.

Exxon had scientists working for them that prided themselves on knowing more about the fate of the carbon molecule and the environment than anybody else. And during that time in the 70s, they were saying to their bosses in the Exxon management, if we continue to burn carbon the way that we are, we are going to warm the globe. And that actually is going to be a bad thing for humanity, but it's going to be a great thing for our company because we're going to melt the Arctic. And there's a tremendous amount of oil under the Arctic, and we're going to be able to exploit it.

So you had people who were on the industry side back in the 70s who were saying this is real now. In my campaign, I'm not going to be talking a lot about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like like COVID, that the Davos group and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls. But isn't that even more of a justification, if you think that, isn't that even more of a justification for you to argue in favor of an approach that doesn't result in the totalitarianism that you're fearful of. Exactly. So, and I've always said, I've always been cautious about leaning on scientific evidence for climate because, and the reason is it's not

persuasive to people who don't want to believe it. I worked for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River for most of my career and all across the country. They love the environment. Republicans, most Republicans love the environment. If you tell them, you know, you're going to protect this place, this sacred place, your backyard, the water for your children, you're going to protect against toxicity. They're all in. It should not be a divisive issue. The environment should not be a divisive issue. I understand what you're saying. But it's hard to persuade people that lines on a graph that say that sometime in the future you're gonna suffer.

Take my word for it. Right. And I want you to give up these things in your life. It just, all it's gonna do is polarize people more. But the argument I've always made is that all of the things that we need to do, whether you believe in climate change or not, you don't have to. And I'm not going to argue with you if you don't believe in it. But all the things we need to do to avert climate change, we ought to be doing anyway to avert war. You know, the oil wars that have cost us $8 trillion since 2002, the poisoning of every

fish in America, the toxicity to our children, the asthma attacks, the ozone particulates, the sterilizing of the lakes on the Appalachian. These are all things that everybody's concerned about. And those are the things that I think we can get a consensus on, and we're not going to get a consensus on climate. And climate using the approach that we've been using up until now has stalled. And the solutions which are to get everybody to sign treaties and have unenforceable milestones that they have to meet that nobody can enforce, that everybody can lie about, and that become an excuse for clamping down totalitarian controls on people are things that are going to get a lot of pushback. But if you talk to people about pollution and let's switch to something that's more efficient,

that's gonna provide jobs, that's gonna give us a new industry and economic growth, that's something that I think we can unite people on rather than divide them. Sure. We've only got about 10 minutes left before I know we gotta get out of here. One something we really wanna talk about is the border,

the current situation down there. How would you handle the current border situation? Would you preserve and keep the remain in Mexico policy? What does an ideal asylum and immigration system look like under your presidency? Well, first of all, I'm going down to the border in the next couple of weeks to, you know, to talk to every to the border in the next couple of weeks to talk to every of the stakeholders of the border patrol, the people on both sides of the border, and try to better understand it and better hone my policies to develop a solution that, first of all, number one, makes the border impervious. We cannot have people coming over, millions or hundreds of thousands of people

coming over illegally. It's not good for our country. It's a humanitarian crisis on the border and we need to end that. There are ways I know of doing it. I've heard many, many different ways, but I don't know myself. I mean, I know that Israel has not a wall, but it has fencing systems and they have the same issue that we do with African immigration and they've been able to not a wall, but it has fencing systems. And they have the same issue that we do with African immigration, and they've been able to stop it and stop the humanitarian crisis. We need to look at this as a humanitarian crisis, and we also need to be honest about the U.S. involvement in the policies that created these huge

migrations of people the year the decades of austerity programs that we've been imposing in Central America of of of wars of supporting dictators and oppressive regimes of supporting genoc, of funding death squads in those countries, of trade agreements that were terribly imbalanced that have created this migration. You look at the one country in Central America that we've never invaded is Costa Rica. And you don't see Costa Rican immigrants

flooding to the border in the kind of numbers that we're seeing other people. Costa Rica today is the wealthiest country per capita in Central America. It's the only country that we have not tampered with. And all of these other countries, we funded these wars and death squads and everything else. And we need to change our policies. So would you commit to lifting sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela? I mean, Venezuela is a source of a lot of migrants right now. I would not.

I would not have sanctions against Cuba or Venezuela. I you know, I think we ought to be encouraging those countries and not bullying them. And I you know, I think I people need to be able to choose their own governments. If they're killing people, if they're committing genocide, then I think we should be doing sanctions. If they're doing something that threatens the United States, we should do that. But otherwise, we should try to work with these countries and de-escalate tensions and be a good neighbor and a good leader and not a bully. People all around the world want American leadership. and de-escalate tensions and be a good neighbor and a good leader and not a bully. People all around the world want American leadership.

They don't want bullying and they know the difference. So I also want to ask you about abortion very quickly. Would you codify Roe versus Wade? What is your view on abortion in terms of national policy should you become president? I mean, listen, there's nobody that's fought harder in this country than I have for bodily autonomy and for medical freedom.

And I think every abortion is a tragedy and most of the people who experience abortion feel that way. And we don't need to compound that by bringing in government and telling people what to do with their bodies. I just think that's, you know, there is no good option, but the only option we have is to let the woman make that choice. So you'd codify Roe versus Wade, go beyond that potentially?

I don't know if you can codify it, but you know, yeah, I think people ought to have. Would you encourage the Senate and the House to pass that law? Like, what is the ideal of a federal framework? In my view, people should have a right and government should not be interfering. OK, so let me ask you about vaccines. This is an area where you and I have significant differences. And, you know, just to level with you on this, like a lot of what you say, I really respond to. I think you're a very genuine person.

But the across the board, whether you want to call it vaccine skepticism or anti-vax advocacy, which has been a central part of what you've been up to for the past number of years. For me personally, it's a it's an issue and it's a it's a real sort of red line. And I know I'm not alone in that, especially running in a Democratic primary. There are going to be other millions of people like me who have similar concerns. So how do you win them over? What's your message to people who think like I do? Well, just tell me where you think I got it wrong.

Well, I think you get it wrong when you draw a correlation between the rise of things like autism and the introduction of vaccines when there isn't hard scientific evidence tying those things together. How do you know? Let me ask you this. How do you know there's not a hard scientific evidence? Well, because the one major study that purported to show that was retracted and the scientist who conducted it was, know had to what you're doing basically fraudulently created I don't want to get I don't want to get in a debate with you about this because you've spent your life pulling out this study now I will tell you let me just tell you let me just tell you

I've listened to hours of interviews with you with an open mind and I'm not persuaded. Now, maybe I'm wrong. That's possible. I'll hold it out there. People can watch. I thought Megyn Kelly did a phenomenal interview with you that went through all these claims piece by piece by piece. I really encourage people to watch that whole exchange because we won't be able to do it justice here in the five minutes we have left. But there are going to be people like me who aren't persuaded and who see this as an issue. And the fact that it's been such a central part of your advocacy means I can't just sort of put it to the side and say, oh, well, I'll just ignore, you know, this piece that's been really important to you in your life. So you're running in a Democratic primary. You have a lot of people who feel even more strongly than me who think that, you know, Dr. Fauci is a hero and all of these things.

How are you going to persuade them? How are you going to reach them? And what is your message to them? Well, first of all, I'm not leading with, you know, my opinions about vaccines. What I say to people is show me where I got it wrong. Show me where I got my science wrong. I've written books about this. You know, I wrote a book about the link between dimericel and autism that has, I think, 450 distilled scientific studies that confirm and validate that hypothesis and 1,400 references. And if I got something wrong, show me where it is. But I think people have shown you where things are wrong, but you don't want to hear it is because I've seen, you know, numerous fact checks. Dr. Vinay Prasad, who we, you know, really respect on the COVID vaccine. He went through your interview with all in. He did a fact check. I mean, it's not an eye fact check of an eye. And you should read that. I will take a look at it. But I don't think that it's fair to say nobody has ever pointed out anything that's been wrong.

Well, here's why people complain about what I say. And again, I'm not leading on this issue. So people can either take it or leave it. But if you want to, you know, I what you just said about me that I'm sort of hard headed and stubborn and just won't give in. You're wrong about that. If somebody shows me where I'm wrong, I'm going to correct it. And, you know, we have the most, probably the most robust fact-checking operation now in North America.

I have 350 PhD scientists and MD physicians on, you know, CHD's advisory board, including until recently, Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus. Chris Portier, who was the head of the National Toxicity Program at NIH, formerly, probably the top toxicologist in America. And if I were saying things that were scientifically unsound, those people would not stay with us. What I would say to you is, show me where I got it wrong. Show me a study that where I got wrong and I will change

my position. You know, science is fluid. It's not a an embarrassment to me if there's a new scientific study that I haven't seen that comes out and says I'm wrong, that's what you're supposed to do with science. But what I'm saying to you, nobody has done that. You know, if an A. Prasad, when he did his piece, if he showed me a science that was valid, I would say I would change my position. If we got the two of you together. You know, read my response to him. So you say this isn't what you're leading with, but I just have to say, as someone who, you know, is watching your candidacy closely and is aware of the advocacy you've been doing and, you know, the organization that you are involved with,

it's hard for me to believe this won't be an important part of how you govern. So I think that's the most important piece for people to get who you have to accept. They're going to be people like me who just don't agree with you on this. You certainly understand that there are many who do think that the vaccines that we have are more beneficial than harmful, that, you know, got their kids vaccinated and are happy for that decision. So how is this going to impact the way that you govern or does it not at all? I mean, I'm going to govern according to, you know, what evidence based medicine. Oh, that's you know, that's let me let me give a specific question. If there's another pandemic in the last pandemic, former President Trump, something we gave him a lot of credit for.

He launched Operation Warp Speed. They had a whole-of-government approach. They used the mRNA technology that was developed using, you know, U.S. taxpayer dollars to get a vaccine out to the population as quickly as possible. How would your approach have differed? My approach would have been a science-based approach. Which means what? Which means a medicine-based approach, the approach that has been used for, you know, and approved for decades. You look first at therapeutics that are off the shelf, and you look at the efficacy of those. I mean, what I would have done if I was in power then,

I would have created an information grid because now we have this Internet that is supposed to benefit us and has become instead an instrument for you know totalitarian control but let's use it for something good let's link all 15 million science doctors frontline physicians all over the world and find out what they're doing to treat this new respiratory virus and find out what they're saying is working and not working and then test that science and then may turn it into instantaneously into protocols and recommendations for other scientists.

So would a vaccine development be part of that or not? Well, you know, I don't think the vaccine worked. I think, you know, if you think it worked, then try to explain to me, are the countries that were unvaccinated much better than our- Many of those countries, because there are a lot of different factors in various countries. So a lot of those countries that you pointed out before, why do we have the highest death rate count in the world by far? I think there are a lot of factors that may go into that. One of them is the fact that we are disproportionately obese as a society.

We have the negative health outcomes that you've been talking about. We don't go outside as much as countries, say as a society. We have the negative health outcomes that you've been talking about. We don't go outside as much as countries say in Africa. I mean, we have there are a lot of different factors that may play into that. But I will I will say, did the vaccines work in the way they were initially promised to prevent spread? No, I don't think so, especially once you got to later variants. But we have a lot of data that shows that in terms of reducing severe hospitalization and death, the vaccines were really important. And maybe there was a cost benefit analysis. I want to see that data. I know that's what the industry says. There is lots of data, and not just from here, from around the

world, that shows the vaccine doses, and not just our vaccines, but ones that were created all around the world, reduced severe hospitalization and death. So in that way, yes, I do very much believe that they were. Let me tell you something. What I believe you're doing now is you're parroting what the public health agencies have been saying, but they do not have a scientific basis for that. And I have another book out that you should look at called Died Suddenly that goes through all the Johns Hopkins data, which is the dashboard data that everybody used and shows exactly what happened when the, first of all, even the vaccine, the Case Western study

that is probably the largest most recent, shows that at most the vaccine gives you a very, very small amount of protection and that after seven months, you go into negative efficacy. So if you got vaccinated, you're more likely to get sick, you're into negative efficacy. So you are more, if you got vaccinated, you're more likely to get sick. You're more likely to get severe illness and you're more likely to die than if you were unvaccinated. I have not seen that. I have seen study after study that shows the opposite. Listen, I don't want to get bogged down in this because I don't

think we're going to see eye to eye here. And we have some other questions we want to get to and your time is short, but we'll put in post, you know, please send us what you're looking at. Yeah, we're happy to put it in. We'll put what I'm looking at and people can judge for themselves. Sagar, go ahead. I just think the final, I know you got to get out of here. So, I mean, the final one is, you know, the idea is you're sitting here your entire career. One of the things that we have fought a lot about on this show against is corruption and also the idea of political dynasties.

So with you, with the famous last name, your father and your uncle, literal American heroes and people that we think about in terms of central to our history, do you think we should have royal dynasties in politics as somebody who's last name is Henry? I don't think we should have royal dynasties in politics. I don't think we do, but we clearly have,

clearly name recognition and, you know, the other things that, you know, give advantage to people whose families have already been in politics, who have infrastructure, who have name recognition, who have a trust that goes with that name, have an advantage. And I don't know how, you know, whether that's something that you want to get rid of. But yeah, I mean, I would acknowledge that that's a truth. And my final question for you is, you know,

do you plan to support whoever the Democratic nominee is? And do you have any intention of running third party if you're running the Democratic primary? I plan on winning the Democratic primary. Okay. But, you know, they're rigging things. They're not going to allow debates. It's going to make it very difficult for you. So if something happens and you don't succeed, what? I do not have a plan B. No plan B? And do you plan to endorse if Joe Biden is the nominee or Marianne Williams, do you plan to endorse the eventual Democratic nominee?

You know, I doubt if I would endorse anybody who's supporting the war. I think that's what my, you know... So you could endorse Trump then? I don't see that happening. You would never endorse President Trump? I don't. I think we have so many differences in

style and approach that I probably would never end up there. All right. Well, sir, we appreciate your time. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Crystal. Yeah, my pleasure. Absolutely.