The Highwire with Del Bigtree - MAHA LEADERSHIP TAKES SHAPE

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

RFK Jr. continues to rake in huge wins this week with the official confirmation of two medical giants into leadership roles, Jay Bhattacharya as head of NIH and Marty Makary to head up FDA. In addition, Susan Monarez was nominated to head the CDC, stirring up some controversy. Hear what this means to restoring trust in public health and fixing the US disease epidemic. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

The pillars of agency heads are now being installed. So we have Jay Batacharya and Dr. Marty Makari. They are now in the FDA and NIH heads that they have been confirmed. That's our tweet there on our ex post at Highwire. And if you don't remember who these people are, if it kind of slipped your memory about how groundbreaking this really is, here's a couple of clips. Here's Professor Jay Batacharya in his opening statements to the hearing committee.

Right. I will establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the NIH. Descent is the very essence of science. I will foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment or scientists, including early career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully. Fourth, if confirmed, I'll carry out President Trump's agenda of making the public science institutions of this country worthy of trust and serve to make America healthy again.

Thank you. You know, is Hollywood ending is, I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, no, I mean, I think what's amazing about that, right? And a lot of what my energy around today is, there's been a lot of Debbie Downers all week long about, oh, R of K, it's over. Obviously, Mary Holland addressed that. But I just want to say if all you did as getting HHS Secretary was to take one of the

leading voices of the Great Barretted Declaration, free bold heroes in Sinatra Group, Jay Badacharya, and Malton Kordorf that came together to push against the entire worldwide scientific community pushing for lockdowns and vaccines and masking and destroyed our world to see one of those individuals, one of the authors of that moment, actually stepping up and being confirmed this week, as the head of the NIH, that alone, we should be dancing in the streets for months. Four months. And were we able to pull up the email? I want to remind people that Jay Botichari, and the Great Barrett and Declaration,

the former head of the NIH, wrote this email that we're going to look at right now. This is Hi Tony, meaning Fauci and Cliff. This proposal for the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the secretary seems to begin a lot of attention and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Levitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. What were its premises? That lockdowns are going to do more damage than this virus will ever do. It's going to destroy people's lives.

It's going to destroy our education system. It's going to ruin the lives of our children. It's going to create rises in suicide, in alcoholism, in child abuse, in spousal abuse. all of these things happen. It's going to ruin our economy. It will not be the move going forward. Three people against the entire world were in that. And the former head of the NIH was saying, we need to destroy that cons. So the court sees backing down now. There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown. Email show how Fauci and head of NIH worked to discredit three experts who penned the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns.

Do you realize where we would have been had Jay Batacharya had the job at that moment? We wouldn't even be here. So anyone that's like, oh, what's really going on there? Robert Kennedy Jr. just got Jay Baticharya confirmed. And for everyone that is concerned about the vaccine and autism issue, well, that came up in the hearing. I want to remind everybody, this is what Jay had to say. I've been told that you have said that we need to invest in IH resources at looking at the link, a possible link between measles vaccine and autism.

I'd not heard that directly as hearsay. Any comment on that? What I have seen is that there's tremendous distrust in medicine and science coming out of the pandemic. And we do have, as you know, Senator, a sharp rise in autism rates in this country. And I don't know, and I don't think any scientist really knows the cause of it.

So I would support an agenda of a broad agenda, a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that. I mean, I actually just was told Del bring it down a notch. They all heard me. I mean, honestly, Jeff, I was ranting and raving before the show in our war room. I told people I'm going to save it for my rant

at the end of the show. Let me take it down a notch. Let me hand it back to you. But what an amazing moment. We actually have a head of NIH that is willing to say, basically, I'm going to put it all on the table. We're going to figure out what's happening with autism.

Oh, my God. Finally. Thank you. Tell his Hollywood, his, his, Bada Chari's Hollywood ending is now complete. He literally has assumed the job, the position at NIH, the director position of his predecessor who tried with all the power at his hands available to him through U.S. government to destroy Bada Chari to destroy his career, his voice to silence him on big tech platforms. And he rose up above that to take his job. I mean, this is, this is as America as it can get. And that's not just him. We have Dr. Mark. Marty McCarie, and here is Dr. McCarie. Take a look.

Half of our nation's children are sick, and nobody has really been doing anything meaningful on this front until we have gotten new momentum and enthusiasm from Secretary Kennedy and President Trump to finally address the root causes of these diseases, general body inflammation, and generalized insulin resistance. And food has a part of it. Food has a big part of it. We are drugging our nation's children at scale. At scale. We have to reassess what we're doing because we're not on a good path right now.

This is a job I'm doing to serve the American public. I believe in more cures and meaningful treatments, healthy food for children, and rebuilding the public trust. I've had an opportunity to spend a little bit of time with Dr. Macri. And what a spectacular. First of all, that was a tour to force if people didn't watch that hearing. I mean, just amazing. It's fantastic that he has the background in television as being, you know, an outspoken doctor for many years on television.

But just another superhero stepping into the space and it is going to bring about real change. And we have Dr. Mehmet Oz. He's going to lead CMS. So that vote should be happening sometime next week. He passed the Senate Finance Committee with a vote of 14 to 13 directly down party lines. All Democrats voted against. So, I mean, these are these are the margins. really we're talking about here. This isn't something like unanimous. It's super tight. Yeah. And so that brings

us to the CDC. Obviously, as you talk to Mary Holland about, we had Dr. Dave Weldon. He and the final hours before his confirmation hearing, he was pulled by the White House only now to be replaced by Susan Monterez. This is NBC News. Trump picks acting CDC director Susan Monterez, Lee, the agency. So she has been acting CDC director for a couple months now. She was going to be, if she confirmed the first non-physician that would head to agency, agency in 50 years. Just some quick background on her. She served under the Obama and First Trump White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But she really, the last couple years, has been leading the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. And this agency uses

through technology to focus on problems with health and medicine. And so this appears to be kind of the low-hanging fruit, perhaps why Kennedy may have picked her. where she can apply this machine learning, this artificial intelligence, to a lot of the questions that we have, like vaccine safety. And I want to remind people that in 2007, way before artificial intelligence ever took hold before we had the technology we do now, VERS, this vaccine adverse event reporting system was automated. So an agency within HHS paid almost a million dollars for a three-year project to automate VERS. So right now, when you have to do a vaccine injury or perhaps a harm, a doctor has to basically file this VAERS report or a patient with the doctor's

information, the hospital has to do it. So they automated this. They sent anybody with the vaccine that has any type of issue down the road in this window. We're just going to stamp it and automate it. And they did that with 715,000 patients. And they found, this was the quote, less, fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported. They found that a three-year study. So think about that with the basic technology of this. the time. If someone, I mean, if the hope like Monterez could come in with AI and wield that type of power on the vaccine safety data link on VERS, on all these other systems within and these aggregating systems, what can be done? What is possible? And so this is one of the hopes that

people are kind of pinning on this woman. She has a PhD, but she has not a medical doctor. And Bobby actually took to X to post this tweet after because there was a lot of pushback against Obviously, some people wanted Joe LaDopo. There was that floated for a moment, but it was off kind of off the radar pretty fast. But he said, I handpick Susan for this job because he's a longtime champion of Mahavala. He was caring compassionate, brilliant microbiologists and a tech wizard who will reorient it, reorient CDC toward public health and gold standard science. I'm also grateful to President Trump for making this appointment. So that's kind of the shake up there in the CDC.

Well, I think that shocked a lot of people, right, that were trying to say this was forced upon him by President Trump and or the deep state and all of the usual sort of conspiracy theories around what's going on. I would say that what I have said that I've witnessed in the moments that I've been around them is that President Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. are incredibly aligned. I think you can look at President Trump. He has made very public statements, even upon the moment of signing Robert Kennedy Jr. into office saying we are going to get to the bottom of this autism issue. He has said that he wants an investigation of the vaccine program. So I was shocked to see how many people said, oh, Trump's making his decision. Bobby has no choice in there. I can tell you, these two guys are getting along very well.

Just like they've tried to divide Elon and Trump. Trump doesn't have people around him that he doesn't like. He doesn't choose people that he can't work with. And there's an amazing dance going on in there. And it's just amazing to me how quickly people want to go to a knee-jerk reaction. or into a negative space. We may not understand why Robert Kennedy-Gene. We're all speculating right now.

She has a background. He obviously said, I care about that background in her research abilities. But again, you know, I think good things are happening and we should try to stay positive.