The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump takes aim at the CDC and Putin is undeterred

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard and Janice start the show with Trump's firing of CDC director Susan Monarez over disputes about vaccine policy, and the attempted dismissal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in his bid to take control of the central bank and lower interest rates. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin brazenly launched a major ballistic and drone attack in Kyiv killing almost two dozen people, only ten days after his summit in Anchorage with the US President. Is it time to call Trump's attempt at a deal a foreign policy failure? In the remaining moments of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to events in the Middle East where Israeli troops are entering Gaza City as the first phase of a planned occupation. Why are both sides so unwilling to accept a ceasefire deal? And why is Trump so focused on ending the war in Ukraine while ignoring the destruction in Gaza? To support the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few. simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to Friday Focus for the 29th of August 2025. I'm Roger Griffiths,

chair of the Monk Debates, joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director, of the Monk's School of Global Affairs. Janice, what are your plans for this the last long weekend of the summer? I am actually going to New York for a meeting, but I would be lying if I didn't tell you

that I was going to find some time for some fun as well. Good, good. Well, it's cooling down already here in central Canada. You can feel our lady of the the snows, as Gourvedell used to describe Canada, just waiting for us a number of months out, but we're still having the beautiful fall, which is my favorite season's, favorite time, time of year.

You know, just a comment on that, Richard, I think the people who love spring like me are born pessimists and the people who love fall like you are just born optimists. Yeah. pessimism optimism a good focus for our first topic which has to be a tumultuous week in US politics we saw a firing and an attempted firing in the form of in the first case the removal of the head of the CDC's vaccine and kind of infectious disease center the person and responsible for all the kind of science that goes behind the Center for Disease Control's recommendations to Americans on vaccines.

And attempted firing. We'll have to see what happens next. It's before the courts. But Lisa Cook, the only black woman appointed to the U.S. Federal Reserve in court suing Donald Trump for effectively overstepping his bounds in attempting to remove her from her appointment to this all-important economic body. Janice, it had a bit of a sense of feel this week of a kind of a turning point. It's strange to talk about escalation, considering all that's happened since January, but escalating we were.

I agree with you, Roger. these are really alarming developments. Let's talk first about the CDC. What a terrible week, frankly, for an institution that, of course, has its challenges, but nevertheless has a reputation for reaching out to get the very best science that it can. Sometimes, even the scientists get wrong.

as you and I both know. But what we saw was the decapitation of virtually every reputable senior scientist in that agency, Roger Hors, in the field of vaccines. And the appointment by Robert F. Kennedy of known opponents of the COVID vaccine and yet again, someone who wants to commission research on the association between vaccines and autism.

It's truly frightening if you let yourself think for a moment about where we would be, were there to be another highly infectious virus that develops. And just layer onto that one more. And a cutback on some of the childhood vaccines, which are standard measles we know all about, but there are others that are being cut back on. Now, if you have little kids or you are the grandparents, the little kids, and those little kids live in the United States, you have to be really worried. Yeah.

In an extraordinary kind of live, televised, almost game show edition of a Trump cabinet meeting, Robert F. Kennedy was heard to kind of make the claim, the spurious claim, that these vaccines cause autism in children. And it seems remarkable that, you know, we're still back there in a sense. And yes, that is a live issue, a live debate. The science is pretty settled on it. But understandably, it's a political debate. There are parties and politicians who want to make hay out of vaccines.

and frankly the overreaction of a lot of governments in terms of lockdowns during COVID, I think certainly gave the anti-vax movement a big proverbial shot in the arm. I guess it's, I guess what I want to come to, though, Jan, is science, this idea that that this thing called science that we've been trying to use for the last two centuries to advance human society. and if you wanted to think of some of the big life-changing, life-enhancing, life-extending developments that science has given us, you know, vaccines might be in the top two or three for the last quarter millennium of our efforts to imply kind of a puricism and rationality

and the scientific method to the physical world. You know, it's really astonishing, Rudyard, because, Frankly, the science is settled on that argument that vaccines causes autism. And let's distinguish, just for a second, I'm getting revert to my professorial mode for a moment here, okay? You know, how science progresses. We do carefully, carefully controlled experiments in order to isolate the causal factor. Now, sometimes those results get overturned because there's a. better designed experiment than the one we had.

Or there were issues with the population that was sampled. But there's no question that all the progress we've made has come out of rigorously done science. And vaccines are a life changer. Look, measles was no more amongst us. And measles, when little kids, got it before vaccinations, could cause really serious and terrible side effects for kids. I won't even go into them, but they're serious. And to be confronted again in this country, in Canada,

in, in, in, in, in Ontario with a measles epidemic, that is one of the largest, is deeply worrying because what it says is this attack on science and the attack on vaccinations is reaching us to enough of the public. that we're not getting what we call herd immunity, which means we have to vaccinate enough people so that the majority of us are vaccinated. This is a worst on goal that I can imagine. It really is.

And one more comment here, because this is so common. You are so right, Roger, about the unnecessary lockdowns we had, particularly in Canada, and particularly, it was really awful and it did a lot of damage. And it, the science really days. I remember talking to them about you on this show, the day that Doug Ford roped off children's playgrounds. Yeah. In what was that?

The second or third wave of lockdowns with Ontario becoming one of the most lockdown jurisdictions in North America. So while I have no sympathy to anti-vaxxers, I do have sympathy to a population that went through a response that to no small extent was shaped by the very experts that are now, unfortunately, being effectively attacked and undermined by this same movement because those very same experts, which the politicians relied upon, took a fairly maximal approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. I understand exactly. what you're saying, but it's so important to do as you just did before,

distinguish between the vaccines and the lockdowns. Vaccines are based on what we call bench science, right? There's carefully controlled experimentation, which follows standard practices that we've used for 100 years and has improved our help immeasurably. The length of a lockdown was never the subject of that kind of science. officials were doing their best, and we have some overly cautious. And, you know, our vice president of research at the time at the University of Toronto, Vivek O'L, who founded our public health agency said, at the time said, this is not the best of public health advice,

because when you're in public health, you balance risks. And they're risk to keeping kids at home. as well as sending the back to school. And as it went on, we had good stuff that we could have used to make school safer. But what a tragedy that vaccines are lumped in with these lockdowns. Yeah. They're not in the same category. Let's move to the case of Lisa Cook, which is another.

Just before we leave it, though, this is going to go to Congress, too. because he has removed virtually the whole top level of seniors. Well, I think a lot of them resigned, Janice. So I don't think it's a question. Three of them. Yeah. So there have been resignations in protest, but they were not all removed by the administration. But this last one is, and she needs to be fired by the president.

The health secretary, the secretary of health cannot do it. She needs to be fired by the president. And interestingly enough, Some official called from the White House told her she was fired, the president has not spoken out about it in public. We are approaching a danger point here. We really are. The case of Lisa Cook, this is a, again, the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Federal Reserve, her term would serve through until, I believe, 2038. The Federal Reserve sets interest rate policy in the United States and has effect on global capital markets because the cost of capital in the United States in a sense reflects so many other costs of capital for other bonds and instruments, financial instruments around the world. This is quite consequential.

Allegations, again, of a somewhat spurious sort, dug out of mortgage applications by, again, a somewhat obscure Trump appointee claiming that she had incorrectly, in their words, falsified her mortgage applications to get lower debt and servicing costs on those mortgages. I think regardless of whether or not that happened or who did that, whether that's something that leads you to be stripped of your role as a governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve, I think, I think is what we're now going to try to figure out before the courts. But what I want to talk to you, Janice, is about the optics of this. A black woman with an impeccable CV of investment banking, commercial banking,

I believe she was a member of the regional Federal Reserve in Chicago, being kind of verbally attacked and publicly humiliated by the president who is a rather large white male. I'm just wondering, again, the, you know,

I had always, I guess, thought that America was a country that was because of its history with slavery and what happened to black communities, communities in the many decades afterwards the Jim Crow laws, we know it all that there was a sensitivity to race. And there was a sensitivity in terms of how political and public figures

interacted with each other on the basis of their race. Because the damage that could be done to racial relations and how particularly historically disadvantaged groups such as black women would then perceive institutions, would perceive the legitimacy or illegitimacy of those institutions are a result of their actions that, I don't know, maybe I'm being nostalgic, but I thought there was a kind of an unwritten covenant that Americans took these things seriously. they took them carefully.

And while nobody is above the law, people were not open in their kind of warfare on a candidate who arguably meets every, you know, meritorious requirement for why she's on the U.S. Federal Reserve. But also, you just can't ignore the fact that this is a powerful black woman. Roger, we started the show by my talking about your optimism and my pessimism. That reading of American history is the optimistic version, right? There is deeply institutionalized racism in the United States for a long period of time, and it's still ongoing.

And Donald Trump has given evidence of example after example, where he displays just that intuitive. racism, frankly. Race plays a role in U.S. politics, and it's difficult. You know, it doesn't play that role in our country in the same way because we have such a different history than the United States does, but race is just interwarment into the fabric of U.S. politics. You know, this case is a really interesting one for a second because although he has made racist statements over and over again, I cringe literally when I hear them. In this case, the real target, as you know, is the Fed.

And it is to control the Fed and to get the chair out, which is going to happen anyway in May. And he wants, I think it's actually more important to him even than controlling the Supreme Court because he wants lower interest rate. You'll stop at nothing. So let's just look at this story. He must have gotten somebody.

through every kind of record because when and where did mortgage records become something that, you know, the president of the United States and the executive branch can access. I would have thought, you would have thought, that amounts to kind of private financial data. Because the point is she was never convicted of anything. Now, I hope he's going to come to grief here because the terms of appointment for a member of that board are pretty clear. There has to be cause. You have to fire somebody.

The only way you can fire somebody is for cause. And what's caused? A conviction. She's never been convicted. So I think on this one, the courts are going to find it very, very difficult to uphold Donald Trump. But even if this wasn't his primary motive, Donald Trump has no combined. functions on singling out and using language about her, which is dog wrestling at racism. Well, a consequential week, we'll have to continue to watch it.

I'm always wondering when we're going to get a pause here to catch our breaths. I think the next big thing is we're all waiting on the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals ruling on an earlier trade court in the legality. of tariffs, as we've talked in the past, I think that could be a consequential moment where the administration would seek an immediate ruling from the Supreme Court. And given how invested the president is in tariffs, wow, I think that'll be a real test to the system,

which may unfortunately make these issues at the CDC or at the US Federal Reserve look like table stakes compared to the roll of the dice that will happen on the rule of law in the United States. You know, Roger, I hate to say it, but I actually think the CDC is the potential ticking time bomb here that could do greater damage than any mismanagement of the U.S. economy. Yeah, I was thinking if U.S. tourism is already taking a bit of a hit, imagine you start getting a sense that when I go on vacation, I'm with like a lot of people that don't have access to basic vaccines?

Is that really where I want to be spending my time, especially if I'm a snowbird? Janice, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listener and viewers. We're going to join Monk donors for the second half of the show. We're going to check in on what's happening in Ukraine, a horrific overnight attack, over 20 people killed in Kiev, and a situation in Gaza that just continues to seem to go sideways. no real resolution in sight.

These are the two big international crises the world faces now. And it seems after a long, hot summer, we've made little progress on either of them. We're going to get into why after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com.

click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents an episode. And we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates, at triple W. Monk Debates, MUNK, Debates with an S.com.