Today, Explained - The report RFK Jr. buried

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

A new report that links increased alcohol consumption to cancer was supposed to help inform the government's new dietary recommendations. Instead, it hasn't been published. This episode was produced by Rebeca Ibarra, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let's talk about some of the things that Robert Floride Kennedy Jr. has done as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mass layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at the CDC. He canceled $500 million in federal funding for MRNA vaccine development. I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges. chondrial challenges with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their... And he might be getting petrochemicals out of your food.

40% of the food industry in this country has taken the pledge to remove food dies from all of their foods. You probably heard about all those things, but on Today Explained, from Vox, we're going to talk about one thing you maybe haven't heard of. It's something he didn't do, a report he didn't publish. A report, he buried. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're joined by Iskra Lawrence, the British model and entrepreneur who's redefining success and what body inclusivity looks like in the fashion industry. From facing rejection for her curves to building a thriving business empire centered on body positivity,

Iskra shares her unconventional path to financial freedom. I had this chunk of money, and luckily I decided it was time. I was like, I am never going to feel disposable again. Fuck this. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. Today, explain Sean Romsferam here with Dylan Scott, my colleague, who's a senior correspondent at Vox covering health care. Dylan, you just published a piece on how the Trump administration has buried a new study on alcohol and its links to cancer. tell us a story.

This story happens in three parts. There's a study that gets commissioned. There's a fierce lobbying campaign against that study. And then there is the ultimate decision not to publish the study in its final form. So let's go back to the first part. Back in 2022, the Biden administration decided they wanted to commission a special report on alcohol and its health consequences. You know, there's been a lot of conversation for years now about whether any amount of drinking is safe or good for you. And the Biden administration is

like, we should just really dive into this. And we'll produce a report that will serve two purposes. It will be submitted to Congress as part of a report that goes to Congress every year about underage drinking. And then it'll be submitted to the health department and the USDA to be considered for the 2025 dietary guidelines. That gets started, and almost immediately there's a pretty big backlash from the alcohol industry and their allies in Congress. A public relation campaign gets underway, on Capitol Hill especially. You've got the alcohol industry circulating documents about the co-authors of this health

report saying like they're biased, their secret prohibitionists, and they find a pretty receptive audience in Congress. What is it with liberals that want to control every damn aspect of your life? I'm proud to represent the Commonwealth of Kentucky home to the $9 billion Kentucky bourbon distillery industry. Wine has played a positive role in society and culture for 8,000 years. to drink two beers a week. Frankly, they can kiss my ass. And Congress actually goes so far as to commission a second study from the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering. You know, they even subpoena the administration to try to get more information about the process that led to the study being commissioned. It's just a general cloud of like, there's something wrong

with this alcohol intake and health study that the Biden administration commissioned in 2022. Then on January 15th, 2025, we finally see a draft version of the report, which is basically the usual routine for reports like this. Authors put together a draft, they post it for the public to see, people can comment, they can critique it, and then the authors take all that feedback and produce a final version of the report. And so this kind of brings us to the third part of the story, the suppression of the report. So they published it for public comment in January. They work on their revisions. And in March of 2025, the authors submit the final version of their report to the Trump administration. And after that, nothing happens.

We never see the report. It is never published in its final form. And the co-authors for a long time just have no idea what's going on. It's radio silence from the administration until last month. And then last month, they were told, the administration does not have any intention of publishing a final version of this report. They're not going to include it in the congressional report on underage drinking, for which it was always originally supposed to be for. And they're just not going to publish it at all. You know, after we reported on this information, the Trump administration told us that the report had been shared with HHS and the USDA to be considered.

for the dietary guidelines. And so that's where we're at, where it's like this report that has been worked on for years by some of the leading alcohol health researchers in the world that was funded by taxpayer dollars, the final version of it is never going to be released by the federal government. Okay, so we have a lot to clarify here. Maybe starting with the fact that there are two reports, one initiated by the Biden administration and one initiated by Congress? we do have these kind of dueling reports. We've got the alcohol intake and health study,

which is what the Biden administration commissioned in 2022. And we've got the National Academy's report, which is what Congress approved in late 2022. And so, I mean, they have some methodological differences, but what's really striking is how different their findings are. And we're going to turn now to a new report that finds even moderate alcohol drinking, why, you look at me like that, Robin. Even moderate alcohol drinking can have an adverse impact on your hill. But they also found that drinking a moderate amount of alcohol actually lowers your risk of dying. So there's like a not dying benefit compared to not drinking at all. Huh. So the alcohol intake and health report showed that at one drink per day for a man. So if you just have

one glass of beer at the end of the day, you have about a one and one thousand chance of dying in your lifetime from an alcohol related cause, which is like, you know, one in one thousand, maybe I'll take my chances. But if you increase that to two drinks per day, and I think it's worth emphasizing that that is the currently recommended limit under the dietary guidelines that currently exist, your chances of dying from an alcohol-related cause increase to 1 in 25. So that's a pretty dramatic difference and a pretty dramatic increase in your health risk, even within the currently recommended limits on alcohol consumption. On the other hand, we've got this National Academy's report, which came to very different conclusions. It actually reported that

maybe some moderate drinking could have some modest health benefits, could actually be maybe, you know, good for your cardiovascular system. And they actually found that the association with cancer is pretty weak. So these are two very different stories about what alcohol does to your body and the risks that it poses. And one of them, the National Academy's report, has was published on time. No questions asked. But the first report is never going to be published in its final form. Trump famously doesn't drink. I can honestly say I never had a beer in my life, okay? RFK is a famously recovering addict. I became a heroin addict when I was 15. Who is obsessed with toxins and the corrupting influence of powerful lobbies. Why would these

two guys, if they indeed did conspire to bury this report, conspire to bury this report. It's a good question, and I have tussled with that question quite a lot. And really, since the Make America Healthy Again movement, you know, kind of came into being, you know, alongside RFK's presidential campaign last year, alcohol's always been kind of a weird issue for them. It's not something that, like, the Maha groups are super outspoken about. it is not, despite Kennedy himself, as you say, being in recovery, something that he talks about very much. And I mean, we can only kind of guess about what their motives might be. But I do think it's, you know, when you remember that there is a very powerful industry with a lot of money

at its disposal that has a lot of pull in Congress, you know, some of the members of Congress who've been most outspoken about this are people representing districts in Kentucky, where, you know, bourbon and whiskey is a popular cultural export, lawmakers from Napa Valley in California with all of its wineries. According to Reuters, the alcohol industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress, and now the U.S. government is expected to revise its guidelines as early as this month, moving away from recommending that consumers limit their alcohol intake. And any new label would require approval from Congress, which could be an uphill battle. The beverage industry spends tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying Congress, Mary.

So this may just be like a bear that Trump and RFK Jr. just didn't want to poke. I don't get that, Dylan. Like, this administration picks so many fights. And the public, I think, is generally aware that drinking is unhealthy. I mean, back in 2023, we covered a similar study that had a very different outcome in Canada, where the Canadian government, after seeing a study that linked alcohol to cancer, told Canadians that any amount of drinking is unhealthy. Like, this is in the water. Why not just let the people have the study that they paid for? So here's the other thing that I think, the even more meta-context that I think is important here, which is COVID and the pandemic.

and the general just war that is currently underway right now between RFK Jr., MAHA, the Trump administration in general, MAGA as an entire political movement, and the public health establishment, the people whom the first group blames for the mistakes of the pandemic and vice versa. These two sides are still hashing it out. They hate each other. I mean, we've seen for the past few weeks the turmoil at the CDC, between their new political leadership and the, you know, long-time staffers who are more part of that old public health consensus. Like, why am I going to team up with all these public health experts who are dragging me about vaccines and the mistakes I made during the pandemic and all kinds of other things to help them get their message out about alcohol?

And that's what links this alcohol story that you wrote about for Vox to the greater phenomena that. is RFK, MAHA, and public health in America right now? Yes. I think what's also telling is this is just another example of MAHA and the Trump administration's actual policies and actions not lining up. You know, I wrote another story a couple of weeks ago about how, like, even though MAHA is outraged about things like pesticides, the EPA is over here. regulating them and doing all, you know, deregulating microplastics and Pfafs, you know,

these other things that Maha is worried about. It does, it just, this is, I think, another example. This alcohol study is another example of how when corporate interests and public health interests seem to be at odds, at least within the Trump administration, it seems like corporate interests tend to win out at least a lot of the time. And I think that is what we have seen with the administration's decision not to publish to this alcohol health report. Dylan Scott, if you want to read his scoop about this buried alcohol report, you can find it

at Vox.com. If you want to hear more about the links between alcohol and cancer, Dylan also appeared on the unexplainable program this week to talk about that. When we were back on today, explained, we're going to ask a guy who's worked in and around public health for decades, what he makes of the job RFK has been doing so far as the head of health and human services here in the United States. Support for today, Explain, comes from SelectQuote. When was the last time you reviewed your life insurance policy?

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like marina wool, strong subpoena cotton, or durable rag wool. Some of my favorites in that list. Nisha Chital is our colleague here at Vox, and she's tried Bambas. After a summer of wearing sandals for months, it does feel like sock weather again. So I'm excited to, you know, start wearing regular non-sandle shoes again. boots, sneakers, flats, loafers, and I think, interestingly, like, I have a Bombas style of sock that could pair with each of those types of footwear. Bombas also wants you know about their mission, which is that for every item you purchase, they donate one to someone facing homelessness. They say over 150 million items have been donated thanks to customers.

Plus, Bombas is available for international shopping to over two hundo countries. You can go to bombus.com slash explain to use the code, explain, for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash explained code explained at checkout. Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and a medical ethicist who works at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked on public health for the Obama administration. One of the things I'm most proud of is that we, We did the food plate. We pushed a lot of nutrition work and revisions.

I worked on global health and trying to emphasize investments in public health infrastructure overseas. But he also worked with the Trump administration. In 2016, 2017, I did some work with him. I tried to actually get him to really focus on prescription drug prices because I thought that was something he was passionate about and might do something about. Early in COVID, I worked with him for about two months, trying to get the COVID response up and running. When it comes to the country's health, he's all for bipartisanship. Working for whoever's president,

as long as they're doing good by the country, is really important. But with that said, he thinks Robert F. Kennedy is a disaster. Yeah, I do not think he's qualified. In any shape or form, he has been a, against vaccines, and that is very bad, probably the single biggest benefit to people in the 20th century in terms of total lives saved from 1974 to today. Those are huge achievements, and now we're trying to roll them back. The thing about Kennedy that I actually supported is his emphasis on nutrition, his emphasis on chronic diseases and trying to address them.

The problem is so far, I mean, the big success we've gotten is dyes. We're going to get rid of the dyes, and then one by one, we're going to get rid of every ingredient, an additive in school in food that we can legally address. That's not going to really save any lives. Addressing the whole food chain and nutrition subsidies that we have in this country, those haven't been addressed. And those are the, you really want to address chronic disease in America, that is a critical step. And yet I don't see him really leaning into it. And yes, it's a challenge, but it's really important. I'm glad you brought up chronic disease in America.

Last week at a Senate hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., defended all of his shakeups at the CDC by saying, We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at the CDC. easy. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy. Are we the sickest country in the world? I don't think we are. Well, I wouldn't say the sickest country in the world. But in terms of high-income countries, we aren't doing that well. And we've fallen off the growth curve, as they say, in terms of increase in life expectancy, decrease in the number of disability, adjusted life years, health span actually getting shorter. And that's been happening

since roughly 1980. And there are lots of hypotheses about that. I'll give you two that I think really are important. You have to remember, and most people won't, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butts. Nobody ever became a secretary of agriculture to win a popularity contest. Butts really leaned into the production of industrial commodity crops with heavy subsidies for corn, soybean, rice, wheat that, again, made the components of ultra-processed foods cheap. And it cut down, by the way, in small family farms, really promoted big industrial farms. And he often said, you know, get bigger, get out of farming. So that was one element.

The other element really timed with Ronald Reagan taking over was a cutback in the social safety net, housing, food stamps, and other social safety net programs. Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. That combination, spending more to get cheaper components for ultra-processed foods and reducing the social safety net, I think are probably two of the biggest components in terms of the obesity epidemic we've had that have really fueled chronic diseases. You see this in the increase in

diabetes, increase in lots of illnesses. I think if we really want to get a health care system, we have to focus on those two elements. I mean, Robert of Kennedy is trying to focus on the CDC specifically. He thinks they've fallen gravely short. Do you think there's lots of areas of improvement at the CDC? Yes, I do think we can improve the CDC. But let's be honest. If you're going to improve the CDC, the first place to start is not cutting its workforce, cutting its budget by billions of dollars, eliminating programs like the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion,

the National Center for Environmental Health, our ability to forecast and monitor adverse health, the public health preparedness and response center, the global health center. So the idea that we need to cut in order to actually improve, I think, is false. What do you think the effects are thus far of RFK's actions at CDC in public health more broadly? Well, you know what? Here's the thing about public health. Public health, you invest today for the benefits tomorrow. So it will take a while to actually see in terms of real harms. But we're already seeing real harms in several ways. The first way is clearly the measles outbreak in Texas, two kids dead, lots of hospitalizations.

It's not just Texas now. It's spread across parts of the country. You're getting increasing vaccine skepticism, and parents who are uncertain don't study the issue, just are trying to, you know, make their lives go and can't really study these various issues. And when you get fewer and fewer people vaccinated, you are going to get disease outbreaks, whether today, tomorrow, or in a long time, we can't exactly predict. I also think, you know, chronic diseases are big problem, which RFK Jr. clearly agrees with, cutting back on our chronic disease programs, you know, our prevention programs, our response

programs, our health promotion programs, that's not a good idea. Maybe we need to do them differently, but cutting is certainly not in the cards for all those chronic diseases. If you want to control health care costs, you've got to address chronic disease better, and cutting back the CDC's role is not better. You know, we've been talking about chronic disease and vaccines. In the first half of the show, we talked to our colleague, Dylan Scott, about how RFK and the Trump administration buried a study about alcohol's links to cancer. And there's no clear explanation for why they'd not want this information to be in the hands of

the public. Where do you think people, everyday Americans, should be turning to for him? health information if they feel like they can't trust the government anymore. And I guess that applies to like the people who are skeptical to begin with and all the people who are skeptical now. The problem with undermining the CDC is you undermine a single source of information, objective really where the goal is to public health. Now it's going to put more burden on people to get their information from a variety of sources. you know on vaccines maybe my good friend mike ulsterhomes project on vaccine integrity or i think

it's called the vaccine integrity project if you want to look it up online in other areas like alcohol you'll have to look at the old surgeon general's report and try to get a copy of that that reported on alcohol's problems especially related to cancer but not exclusively there are global you know alcohol is a global issue so there are a lot of global resources available whether England or Australia or the Cochrane Collaborative. But that requires a lot more effort. And that's one of the problems is everyone's short on time, right? And spending a lot of time running around and looking for individual programs

rather than being able to go to one site and readily access an objective answer is a major, major problem. And that, I think, is part of the plan for this administration, is make it very difficult to get this kind of information. And it's working. Unfortunately. Ezekiel Emanuel, his friends call him Zeke. Rebecca Ibarra made this episode of Today,

explained Amina al-Sadi, edited Laura Bullard, fact-checked, Adrian Lilly, and Patrick Boyd mixed. Welcome back, Patrick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.