The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - While I Was Gone, Part 2: US Health || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

RFK Jr. was busy while I was away...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/while-i-was-gone-part-2-us-health

Well, Peter Zion here coming from the Lake of the Ozarks. We're continuing our, what the hell did you guys do over the last two weeks while I was gone? And today we have to talk about the intersection of health policy and national defense. While I was gone, RFK Jr., who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has basically downgraded most vaccines, specifically with COVID vaccine, saying that they are no longer recommended for use for most Americans, really just for people who are at risk. And any doctors who decide to buck HHS recommendations

will no longer have state certification for things like insurance, basically saying that I have made up some new rules, I have fired all of the doctors, and if you don't follow my rules, then you can't get insurance. Topping it off, he fired the director of the Center for Disease Control,

a woman by the name of Muradis. And when she was let go, basically all the senior staff that have medical credentials left with her, which has left RFK to basically staff the world's premier disease prevention and to be with people who have basically no medical experience and are basically driven by conspiracy theories. So we are now setting up for a direct clash between HHS and the CDC and the medical community writ large.

The health implications of this are to say dire by making doctors choose between being politically-critically. correct in actually providing medical care. And by denigrating vaccines, which have been the single largest cause of the increase in the American health system for the last century and basically pushing that down to the bottom is going to have some catastrophic outcomes moving forward. This is no longer purely an issue of health or politics. This is now graduated into the area of national security. And let me just give you one reason why we should all be very, very worried. Let's look at MRNA vaccines.

That's the relatively new technology, less than a decade old. It was the backbone of what happened with COVID, which saved at least a million American lives, probably significantly more just in the first year. MRNA vaccines are what you might call a digital vaccine. So with a traditional vaccine, you're growing the virus in something like an egg yolk medium, and then you grow enough of it and kill the virus

to make a weakened or a dead virus vaccine that you inject in order to trigger an immune response. That's not how our mRNA works. With MRI, you identify a specific part of the virus that you think is going to be vulnerable, and then you digitally manufacture a molecule that interferes with that specific site. So the amount of organic material in an MRI vaccine is minimal, but also because it's basically designed and manufactured, you can produce it very, very quickly. You can design your molecule in a matter of days.

You can bring in a large-scale production in a matter of weeks rather than having to just inject egg after egg after egg after egg after egg and it will eventually produce enough of whatever it is for 300 million people. Because of that, any bioweapons defense system that the United States is going to have has always been next to impossible because once you identify what the enemy pathogen is going to be, you then have to go through this months-long process of producing enough vaccine to combat it. With MRNA, you can do that as a month.

So we're now in a situation where all of our bioweapons defense systems have basically stopped because we have a freak show running the HHS. And now that the CDC has basically been purged of doctors at the top levels, we no longer even have a voice in the federal government that is looking after the health of American people. At the moment, Robert Kennedy Jr. continues to be wildly popular with the MAGA base, so I see no reason that Donald Trump is going to fire him, but it also means that the federal health authorities in the United States have basically become non-functional

and now are contributing to America's health care problems rather than trying to mitigate them. Remember that earlier in this administration, all cooperation with international medical communities was basically severed, so the United States is now basically sitting in a box, digging itself into a hole and not even looking out for future threats,

much less setting up the infrastructure to deal with them. not good