The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Administration Ignores The Experts As It Cancels $500 Million For Vaccines

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine development contracts this week. We discuss how the move follows a trend of actions by the Trump administration that ignore the advice of subject-matter experts.This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR's Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week on Consider This, the fight over gerrymandering, spreading from Texas to other states. Now some Democrats want to fight fire with fire. And a lot of us are searching the web differently, letting AI do it for us. Why the internet could change if you search but never click. This week on Consider This, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Kara in Cordelaine, Idaho. I'm getting ready to go out and pick raspberries from my work. raspberry bushes in the backyard.

This podcast was recorded at... 12.38 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, August 8th, 2025. Things may have changed since you heard this, but I'll be enjoying either raspberries and cream or raspberry crisp or even raspberry sorbet. Okay, here's the show. Well, you know what they say? When you pick raspberries, you lose.

listen to the NPR Politics Podcast. Do they say that? Yep. I will say, like, I know gardening is something that I eventually want to get into, but anything in a Bush, I'm just afraid something's going to get me when I'm sticking my hand in there. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I don't know.

I feel like digging around the dirt. Anyways. All right. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And NPR Health Policy Correspondent, Selena, is here as well. Hi, Selena. Hello. And this week, the Trump administration canceled roughly $500 million in contracts to develop MRI vaccines. Today on the podcast, we're talking about how this move follows a pattern of the administration ignoring the advice of subject matter experts. Selena, let's start with you.

What was the reason that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave for canceling these contracts in the first place? Well, you know, the context here is that Kennedy has built his reputation and fortune advocating against vaccines. You know, he sued drug makers and regulators. In particular, when it comes to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, he's called them a crime against humanity. So this week, he posted a video explaining the decision, and he simply said he had reviewed the evidence and determined that MRI vaccines don't work well for upper respiratory diseases and that there are more risks than benefits, and so they're just going to cancel these contracts. Of course, experts in infectious

disease and biosecurity overwhelmingly panned this decision. They say that this is new technology that has a lot of promise. It's not perfect, but, you know, there's a lot to explore in this research and pulling the investment really makes no sense. Yeah, but this goes beyond vaccines, right? Like Kennedy has long question experts. I mean, how does this fit into his larger worldview here? Yeah, you know, distrust of experts, distrust of conventional wisdom that has been a hallmark of how Kennedy operates. He has espoused a lot of conspiracy theories on all sorts of topics. Like Wi-Fi causes cancer. HIV might not really cause AIDS. Antidepressants are linked to school shootings. And I want to be clear that none of those things are true. But those are things that he

has said in the past. And, you know, he was asked about this during the confirmation process. I keep thinking about this one moment when Senator Tim Kane, Democrat of Virginia, asked Kennedy about all of these conspiracy theories, and here's what Kennedy said. My father told me when I was 13 years old, he said people in authority lie, and that the job of a citizen in every democracy is to maintain a fierce skepticism. A fierce skepticism, right? So now even though he is the authority, he is the highest ranking health official in the federal government, he's also really leaning into the distrust of health agencies like the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Administration, you know, ousting top scientists, cutting a lot of staff. 20,000 staff numbers have left the HHS agencies over the time that he has been in charge. So this is really profoundly a key part of how he views the world and how he is operating in this role. You know, And we all should have a fierce skepticism, right? I mean, that's part of the hallmark of being a journalist. You should be skeptical of those in power. But it means going in search of the best information, the consensus from experts, and trying to get the best information, not the stuff that I necessarily agree with and say, oh, there's a link, a fringe study that agrees with this thing that I have a sense of. No, you should be open enough to say, I don't have all the answers. And I'm going to go to those who are the best. best at understanding this stuff. And I think it's one of the bigger problems in society that if you can't agree on a shared set of facts, then it makes it really hard to then argue about what the policy prescriptions should be to then solve those problems in the best public policy kind of

way. Yeah. I will say this with Kennedy. There had been a few Republicans, including Republicans who confirm Kennedy, raising concerns about this move to cancel these MRNA research grants in particular. I'm thinking about Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. He posted. on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the decision was unfortunate and that Kennedy has, quote, conceded to China an important technology needed to combat cancer and infectious disease. But he voted for him, right? He voted to confirm him. He's not doing much more than putting out a statement. And there's not a whole lot that you can do once you put somebody in the job. And there were lots of concerns that a lot of people raised beforehand.

Yeah. I mean, Senator Bill Cassidy is a physician. He has spoken passionately about vaccines and about the suffering that they can spare people, the lives that can be saved. But he could do more here than just say this is unfortunate on social media. You know, he could hold a hearing about MRNA technology. If there is evidence that this isn't a good investment, then let Kennedy show it to Congress and, you know, make the case and hear from other people about whether, you know, to defend their view that this is a bad decision to cancel these contracts. I should also say that the process of grant making for NIH grants involves so many hands.

And so this kind of unilateral decision by the secretary is unprecedented and really alarming to a lot of scientists. Yeah. And Domenico, how do these responses from folks like Cassidy compare with what we're hearing from Trump's base when it comes to this decision? Well, I mean, so much of this has roots in COVID, in the COVID pandemic. And even though Trump pushed to develop these vaccines that did allow people to then go out to rest of, again and, you know, for the most part, found to be very safe. You know, Trump has not come out to say, oh, you know, we should continue this because he's stuck in this difficult position because a lot of people in his base really are distrustful of the experts of the vaccines. And he's had to kind of walk this line because COVID was really

a political problem for him that he wanted to find a way out of. These vaccines helped him get out of that, even though he wound up losing the 2020 election. You could argue for mishandling the COVID pandemic. But a lot of people within the MAGA movement really don't think that trusting the CDC, trusting the vaccine experts is the way to go. And that's made it more difficult for Trump to be able to voice support for the kind of vaccines that he helped push to develop. Yeah.

And Selena, this isn't the first time that Kennedy has like sideline experts at the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you give me other examples of when he's done something like this? Yeah, you know, one thing that got a lot of attention is when Kennedy fired the full panel of outside experts on vaccines that the CDC uses to help them make good recommendations. He said he was not going to mess with the ACIP panel when he was going through the confirmation process, and then he fired 17 of these experts and put in a handpicked roster of people who had, you know, historically spread misinformation about vaccines. the reduction in force that he oversaw, you know, 20,000 staff members from HHS, including really top scientists gone from the agency, I think is another really key example. And changing the recommendations for pregnant women to get the COVID vaccine, that's another

example of Kennedy has put his judgment ahead of people with expertise in particular fields. Yeah. The loss of expertise doesn't seem to be unique to HHS. Domenico, where else have you heard of the Trump administration either ignoring the advice of experts or losing many altogether? Well, it's really foundational to Trump's political movement and has been for the last decade. You know, we've seen on trade, for example, we have lots of experts warning that tariffs could lead to higher prices already are in some sectors. Businesses have been stockpiling and absorbing some of the costs for now, but experts don't expect that to last forever. Trump's team says, forget that. that's nonsense. Don't believe them. Believe us. They've been wrong about so many things in the past. And that's how they kind of keep everybody in line, at least in their base. Then when it comes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency that is not usually finding itself the target of politics. But Trump was upset with the numbers that came out that showed a softening labor market. And, you know, it doesn't help his political goals. So he's going to,

then undermine those who are experts. And they've done this repeatedly when you're talking about undermining institutions within the government, outside of the government, the media and elsewhere. And that's really one major way that right-wing populists across the globe have been able to retain and consolidate power. All right. We're going to take a quick break. More in a second. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I just talked to comic actor and podcaster Mark Maron about grief, cats, his early stand-up, and why he's often guarded in relationships, but on his podcast and in front of an audience, he's open and vulnerable. I'm very open, parted when people are going to leave.

Find my interview with Mark Maron, wherever you listen to fresh air. And we're back. We were talking a moment ago about the other ways in which the Trump administration has moved away from the advice of subject matter experts. Selena, have we begun to see any real-world effects from that? Yeah, when it comes to health, I think it's a little too soon to say. So there were all of the reduction in force, the firings of staff across HHS, happened in April, but they were on hold for a long time. And from what I've heard, health agencies are kind of held together with duct tape. And I don't know that all of the things that aren't going to be happening.

We haven't really felt that as the public yet. Yeah. But there have been concerns about food safety, which is one. one thing that could hit the public. I would say coming into fall vaccine season, it's hard to know whether, you know, vaccinations for flu and other kind of seasonal infectious diseases is going to dip and how insurers are going to respond to these changing recommendations. I think those are big open questions. The other thing is that in the fall is going to be open enrollment for insurance. And there have been a lot of changes to insurance that health policy

experts talking about expertise have warned are going to lead to many, many, many millions of people losing their health insurance and becoming uninsured. As we've been saying, there's been this kind of blanket, well, maybe that won't happen. And I think that we're coming up onto the months where we might actually see lots of people losing health insurance. And, you know, the proof will be in the pudding, right? Like, do these policies lead to people becoming uninsured or not. Yeah. And I imagine, Domenico, that this would lead to definitely political consequences, whether it's a bad COVID or flu season or people losing insurance. I mean, what do you see could be the political cost of all this for Trump? Well, I don't know if there's any political cost for him because it did maybe cost him the 2020 presidential election, but he's not running again. He's barred from running again in 2028. So it may not affect him. Of course, it all comes back to the idea of competence. in government. And it's one thing that former President Biden was really tasked with, which was to show that there was a different way to govern and that if you had good governance, then that could restore

faith in these institutions. Well, that didn't happen. Then it just kind of came back to Trump being able to say, see, you can't trust any of these folks and their words just don't mean anything. And when it comes to expertise and the trusting of expertise, I mean, just we mentioned Bill Cassidy and the senator from Louisiana and that tweet that he put out or that ex post, you know, when I looked at Cassidy's post, the first reply I saw was one that said, can you disclose how much you receive from pharma? I think we'd all like to know. And I think that very kind of thing is what muddies the waters and makes it easy for people to say, I don't believe you, I don't need to believe you. I don't care if you're a doctor. There's some other conspiracy to undermine your value. Yeah. And I wonder, I want to hear from both of you on this. Like, what are the long term consequences? of this? Well, I think that there's a concern that the disinvestment in scientific research is going to have a really long tail. The NIH is the biggest public funder of scientific research in the world. And there's been a lot of cancellation of grants, you know, a lot of labs that were set up

with multi-year grants that went through this complicated vetting process, just had their funding pulled, people fired, you know, that research just isn't going to happen. And so it's hard to know. it's hard to say like this technology would have existed or this, you know, pandemic could have been prevented. The way scientific research works is like you have to just have faith in the process and have faith that what looks like something kind of small could turn into something really valuable for society. It's hard to kind of look into a crystal ball and see exactly how this is going to play out. But, you know, we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that public trust can make or break a response. And so I do think that this further erosion of public trust,

even when there isn't a crisis like COVID-19 on the horizon that we know of, is really concerning, you know. And those are, you know, real life consequences from a policy standpoint. Politically, leadership really matters. You know, and if this continues, we're going to continue to see everything viewed through a partisan lens of what your chosen leader says and tells you to do. So unless you have leaders that are able to say, hey, guys, we actually all agree on these stats and these numbers. You should too. You're going to continue to see this erosion of trust in the government, trust in the media, and people believing what they want to believe. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go.

And we're back. And it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go. That's the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. And Selena, I want to start with you because this is your first time doing Can't Let It Go. I'm very excited to hear what you... It's my debut. Yeah, let's hear what you've been pondering. So what can't you let go of this week? Okay, so something that I would like to share with America is that I'm a big fan of pro cycling.

And we are a Tour de France family. Actually, we watch all the big tours, but the summer is all about the tour to France. The men's tour to France this year was real boring because the same guy always wins, the snooze. It's like three weeks of the snooze. Yeah, well, it's Tade Pagacha, who is a Slovenian cyclist, but he's so much better than everybody else. It's a snooze. But the women's tour to France, guys, was so good. It's only nine stages long.

They don't give you the full three weeks of racing, but it was so. good. Mariana Voss, who's the best of all time, had the yellow jersey at the beginning and Kim LaCourt got the yellow jersey. She is this really amazing writer from Mauritius. And then towards the end, this 23-year-old French writer named Mavis Squibbin raced up the mountain and won a stage of the Tour de France out of the blue. Everyone was like, who is this person? Next day, another huge mountain. She does it again. What? It was insane. It was so fun to watch. Anyway, women's cycling. I'm such a big fan. Everyone else should watch too. It's so great. I don't know how they go uphill. That's the thing I just don't get. I know they have like really cool bikes that you can like hold on your like finger. But like I don't know how they make it. I'd have to get off and walk my bike.

Yeah. And also the cardiovascular strength that that takes like to do that for an extended period of time is kind of nuts. It's insane. But my spouse is a serious. cyclist and watching this, she was like, oh, yeah, that looks fun. Ah, okay. No. You get the inside scoop. Yeah. All right.

Well, Domenico, what can't you let go of this week? Well, it's less what I can't let go of and apparently what the government can't let go of, which is McGruff the crime dog. Remember him? Oh, yeah. And a little trench coat. Yeah, the trench coat in the 1980s, he used to have these ads about how he was going to be tough on crime and, you know, he's going to take a bite out of crime is what Mcruff used to say.

he's back to try to stop other kind of crime, which is fentanyl crossing the border. He's in these new ads like this one. Did you know that fake prescription pills may contain fentanyl? And an amount small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil can be lethal. Number one, I think my daughter would listen to this ad and just go, ugh, cringe. Like the way she talks about me whenever I try to use Gen Zingo. I was going to say, it has been 40 years and still anti-drug ads. are so cringe-worthy.

Like, they haven't gotten any better. I also have questions about the voice. Yeah. Is it AI? It's not the same voice as McGruff in the 80s. And I want this backstory on that. Yeah, yeah. All right, Ashley, what can't you let go of?

Well, what I can't let go of this week is this story I saw on the AP about a zoo in Denmark that is asking for donations of small pets as food for predators at the zoo. What? Yeah. So they're trying to, like, they say, mimic the natural food chain of the houses, of, like, the animals that are there. This is for the sake of both animal welfare and the professional integrity that the zoo offers. But anyways, this is like a way to, they say gently euthanized, your small pets, like your guinea pigs and rabbits and stuff. And they're like, make sure they're healthy. So, like, who is giving, like, their healthy guinea pig over to be eaten by a snake or something?

Frustrated with your Pomeranian pooping around the house, give it over to this hawk. You're very small chihuahua barking too much. It's just like, I don't know, I found this horrifying. I'm sure there's like an ecological reason why this is like a better way to get rid of a small pet. But I was horrified, you know, a pet owner. It's cold. It is.

All right. That's a wrap for today. Thank you for joining us, Selena. Thanks for having me. It was really fun. Yeah. Our executive producer is Methoni Maturi. Our editor is Rachel Bay.

Our producers are Casey Morel and Brea Suggs. Thanks to Padma Rama and Diane Weber. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.