What A Day - The Vax Wars Are Here

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is likely to reverse its long-standing recommendation that all newborns be immunized against Hepatitis B. We spoke with Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, about the long-term impact of the proposed changes, how parents should respond, and whether we should all worry about vaccine recommendations coming from this administration.And in headlines, the Supreme Court could greatly expand the presidential power over independent federal agencies, Paramount launches a hostile takeover bid to pry Warner Bros. Discovery from Netflix, and President Donald Trump saves American farmers from tariffs by using… tariffs?Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Tuesday, December 9th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is why today, the show that will make you a promise. This show will never make an AI version of a founding father just to spout things we would say anyway. Take notes, Glenn Beck. On today's show, the streaming wars go nuclear. Paramount launches a massive hostile takeover bid to pry Warner Brothers Discovery from Ted Sarandos at Netflix. And President Donald Trump saves American farmers from tariffs by using tariffs. But let's start with vaccines.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to change a recommendation for children that's almost older than I am, a move that could have a major impact on the health of Americans. In an 8 to 3 vote, the ACIP voted to end the universal recommendation that all newborns be immunized against hepatitis B. As we mentioned on the show yesterday, the ACIP, which is a. been newly stacked with people holding anti-vaccine beliefs, instead recommended that women who test negative for hepatitis B discuss, quote, when or if their child should be vaccinated at birth.

The recommendation still needs to be approved by the acting director of the CDC, Jim O'Neill, who has no medical expertise, but was managing director of an investment fund co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, a close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance. O'Neill also previously served as Director of Teal's Private Foundation, which is still not medical expertise. But according to Dr. Joe Hilbin, who sits on the ACIP, no medical expertise or data showed the vaccine caused any harm ahead of the decision, and it didn't matter. Here he is on CNN on Monday. If we're going to make our decisions based on data, I want to see the data, and I repeatedly

asked for it, and no data of harm was presented. There were speculations. Oh, oh, we need to have future studies of hundreds of thousands of people, and we have to examine the possibility of an unknown, unknown. Well, to me, that's speculation, and that's not data. I do not like that information. And neither does Dimitri Descalakis. He's the former director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. We spoke about what's going on in the ACIP, the new recommendation, and how parents should

respond. Demetri, welcome to what today. Thank you very much. Good to be here. The hepatitis B vaccine has been recommended for all newborns for more than 30 years. Why has it been given to newborn babies and how has it affected rates of hepatitis B in the U.S.? It's one of the biggest public health successes that we have actually. So before the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine was implemented, there were tens of thousands of newborns that were diagnosed with hepatitis B. So hepatitis B is a a virus that you can find in people's blood, if they're infected, it is transmitted in a couple of different ways. So it's transmitted vertically.

That means from mother to child, but also it's called horizontally, which means between people, not from mother to child, through a couple of different ways. So like sharing household items such as a toothbrush, a razor, a nail clipper, in the course of taking care of a baby or someone who needs more care. and then also it is sexually transmitted and can also be transmitted through shared injection equipment.

Yeah, and I think that that's why there's been a lot of talk on weirdo, right-wing internet about how like, well, I'm not a intravenous drug user. I obviously wouldn't need this. But one, some people are. And two, to your point, it is transferable in lots of different ways. And I may have never used intravenous drugs,

but I have used a nail clipper. Indeed. And, you know, when you take care of someone like a child, they're bloody sometimes, they're snotty, they're messy, they've got secretions, you cut your finger, that virus can live on sort of the material for a while. And so it could happen that a child is infected just in the routine course of taking care. And I think people tried to do a lot of things to fix that. So first there was testing, then it was first targeted to sort of folks who were at higher risk, then it became more universal testing. And that still didn't get the

rate down. We still had lots of cases. And so around 1991, they implemented. They implemented. implemented a birth dose, a universal birth dose, meant that there was like no one that was going to fall through the cracks and everyone was going to be covered. And the effect is that last year, it was just a dozen or so cases of hepatitis B we had. And that matters because 90% of kids in that age range that get hepatitis B will go on from that very early infection to what's called chronic infection, which means that the virus is in their body, they're not able to clear it. And of those kids, 25% as they get older will die of a complication of hepatitis. I like to think of the hepatitis B virus kind of like a toxin in your body that leads to liver

cancer and to scarring of your liver. And so as long as that toxins like floating around, your liver can potentially get very sick. The vaccine super well tolerated. The risk benefit ratio is great. There's no new science that would indicate there's any reason to change it. and it has, in effect, prevented death from liver disease. Yeah, and to that point, a CDC panel voted to change the recommendation. What change are they recommending?

So it's interesting. They've sort of gone back in time and are trying to use the hepatitis B status of the mother to dictate what happens to the child. And so that's the main change that they've made. And then for individuals who are hepatitis B negative, they say, talk to your doctor to decide if you should get the vaccine at that time. So that's really kind of not a change at all because you always talk to your doctor to see if you want to get the vaccine at that time.

The other thing that they did, which is based on absolutely no science, and I can't even imagine how to implement it, rather than giving the three doses of the hepatitis B vaccine, which is what you need to have durable lasting protection from hepatitis B, they voted to recommend getting the first dose, checking a lab to see if your body responded to it, and then deciding on subsequent doses after that. Problem being, there's no data that supports that, and what we know from the vaccine is that you need three doses to get durable protection. So that one is a dud the whole way and makes no scientific sense. Let's talk a bit about the advisory committee on immunization practices, which voted for this change. Who is on it now, and how did it

typically function? So there were 17 scientists who had been known for decades amongst medical folks as very balanced good experts in either pediatrics, public health, or immunizations. And they were all fired in July of 2025, with the explanation being that they had too many conflicts of interest. They replaced them with a group of people who were mainly ideologically aligned with Secretary Kennedy, conspiracy theorists, people who support, for lack of any better terminology, anti-vaccine ideology. So what happened was they took. took an advisory committee that has an important history in being critical in creating very important health policy for the CDC director to review and approve.

And what they replaced it with is ideology with a CDC rubber stamp on top. And that's what we're seeing. However, they have put a couple of good people on as demonstrated by some of the folks that were pushing back against some of the terrible decisions. There seems to have been a lot of dysfunction leading up to this vote to change the newborn hepatitis B recommendation, as evidenced by my colleague who went the minutes of the meeting, and there were just lots of people who didn't seem to even know what they were voting about. But what was the argument at these ACIP meetings for ending their

universal recommendation? So that's the part that's so confusing. I'll just echo what you said. It was a dumpster fire as far as meetings go with so much confusion. They couldn't get the language straight for the votes. They kept changing the language. And then when they were voting, they wouldn't actually show the language. So I think many of the people voting didn't. know what they were voting on. But, you know, I think that the main issue is that the presentations that you heard at the advisory committee on immunization practices were ones that didn't have science that was reviewed for quality. And so there was a environmental scientist who does not take care of patients, so someone who has sort of view into the environment, who has historic

anti-vaccine perspectives, who presented on the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine. meaning how well the vaccine works. So that would be like me presenting on global warming. I could probably do a presentation, but I am not an authority. So things that were presented were about theoretical risks, not real risks. Benefit was nearly ignored. So the perspective was that, you know, hepatitis B doesn't really happen to normal people. It only happens to people, like you said, people who may have an underlying risk factor.

And so it was a lot of mumbo-jumbo, frankly, that was cloaked in, in scientific-sounding presentations that came from sources that actually don't actually have the chops to be able to sort of either present that data or make any recommendations. I've seen this a lot from anti-vaxxers, is that they kept making comparisons between what shots the U.S. recommends to other countries and what shots they recommend. Denmark specifically was brought up a lot because it does not universally recommend the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. Now, Denmark seems like a lovely place, but what do you make of that argument? Denmark, the size of Minnesota.

Yes. So that's really important. I would love to mimic the Danish childhood vaccination schedule once we have universal health care. The reality is that our vaccine schedule has evolved for several reasons. So we know what infections kids are at risk for. We also know that we don't have perfect universal health care, which Denmark approximates pretty close to perfect.

And we also don't have a system that gives us a view and to the health of every person in great detail. The strategy for the American vaccine program is less about cost effectiveness and more about the view that we should have no one die or even acquire, if possible, a vaccine preventable disease. Zooming out a little bit, I know that you're very concerned about this and so am I, but this is one change made to one vaccine schedule, and it still needs to be approved by the acting director of the CDC.

But why is this vote such a big deal when it comes to U.S. vaccine policy, and to me it's such a big deal for child health? Yeah. I mean, I think that this vote is important for a couple of reasons. One, generally when you make a change to vaccine policy, there has to be a public health problem that you're solving for. And there has to be something new, some data, some change that would motivate a change in the vaccine policy. None of that happened. There is no public health problem except for hepatitis B. This doesn't solve for that. It makes it worse. And the data that was presented went through no scientific review, they pretty much got up there and said

whatever they wanted to say, and then they voted however they wanted to vote. It is a precedent that says that they can just do that, that without any supporting data, without any public health problem, they can change the schedule up for children in the U.S. It got worse when the White House the next day put out a decree saying that Secretary Kennedy

and the acting director of CDC, who, by the way, is not a scientist. If they decide that the American schedule doesn't look as good as it should, and it should look more like the Danish schedule, they've now been empowered to make that change, maybe without even any public deliberation. Moving forward, this is something I've asked a host of people who used to work at the CDC or are public health experts. Where should parents turn? What do you do when the organization you're supposed to turn to for guidance, especially in the delivery room, where if you've just had a child, maybe you're not 100% up to reviewing vaccine schedule. policy papers. What do you do when the organization you're supposed to turn to for guidance is no longer trustworthy? Yeah. I mean, the answer for parents is the answer that I always have, which is talk to

your pediatrician. And so that puts a lot of burden on the pediatricians, but their organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, as an example, the obstetrics gynecology folks at ACOG, all of them are actually giving their doctors very clear guidance on what to do. And unfortunately, it kills me to say, as someone who loves CDC, all of them say to ignore this recommendation. Dmitri, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Dmitri Descalakis,

former director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day is brought to by Zbiotics pre-alcohol.

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Make the most of every toast this holiday season. Just don't forget to bring pre-alcohol along for the ride. Here's what else we're following today. You're asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent. Liberal U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor pushed back against a Trump administration attorney as he argued for expanded presidential power over independent federal agencies. which are independent for a reason, but that's neither here nor there. The High Court heard arguments in Trump v. Slaughter on Monday. The case stems from Trump's effort to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause.

After more than two hours of back and forth, the court's conservative majority suggested it would overturn, or at least rein in, a 90-year-old decision that limits the president's power to fire agency board members. That would be in the Trump administration's favor, and Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that president should be overruled. But it continues to generate confusion in the lower courts, and it continues to tempt Congress to erect at the heart of our government, a headless fourth branch, insulated from political accountability and democratic control. Liberal justice, Elena Kagan, warned that leaving the status quo will have consequences. So the result of what you want is that the president is going to have massive, unchecked, uncontrolled power, not only to do traditional execution, but to me.

make law through legislative and adjudicative frameworks. The Supreme Court will likely decide Trump's slaughter by the end of summer. Paramount has initiated a tug of war with Netflix by launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Reminder, Warner agreed last week to sell to Netflix, who would pay $82.7 billion for equity and debt. Key details, Netflix deal did not include CNN and Warner's other big cable outlets. On Monday, Paramount offered to buy the entire business, and it would pay about $25 billion more than Netflix. Of course, neither the Netflix deal nor the Paramount offer is sealed until the White House sings, right? Paramount argues it's more likely to pass antitrust scrutiny

by the Trump administration. Unlike Netflix, Paramount is run by David Ellison, whose family is chummy with Trump. And that's not all. A regulatory document released Monday states that an investment firm run by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would participate in the parent's deal for Warner. But during an event at the White House Monday, a reporter asked Trump about the bidding war, and he sounded non-committal. I have to see what percentage of market they have. We have to see the Netflix percentage of market, paramount, the percentage of market. I mean, none of them are particularly great friends in mind. You know, I just, I want to do what's right. It's so very important

to do what's right. Oh, now you want to do the right thing. What's I just talking about Trump and Paramount? Well, yeah, but there's more about Trump and the company. Follow me. On Monday, Trump took the truth social and complained about an interview on 60 Minutes, because, as you know, he has no engrossing hobbies. Sixty Minutes is run by CBS, and CBS is owned by Paramount, or technically Paramount Skydance.

Anyway, on Sunday, 60 Minutes ran its interview with Georgia Republican representative and newest Trump critic Marjorie Taylor Green. Here she is speaking to 60 Minutes correspondent, Leslie Stahl. After President Trump called me a traitor, I got a pipe bomb threat on my house, and then I got several direct death threats on my son. On your son? On my son. You say the president put your life in danger.

You blame him. You say he fueled a hot bed of threats against me, and that you blame him for threats against your son. The subject line for the direct death threats, on my son was his words, Marjorie Trader Green. Finally enough, hearing about the death throats caused by his words made Trump mad. His post on true social aimed at everyone involved. Quote, my real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ trader. It was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air.

They are no better than the old ownership. And that new ownership of Paramount, that would be the Ellison's, a family that's on the ins with Trump. Or at least, Trump thought they were. which brings us back to the whole Paramount deal to buy Warner. Maybe Trump's being honest that despite the fact that his son-in-law would be involved in a paramount deal, he has no personal friends involved

after all, or friends in general. We're going to use that money to provide $12 billion in economic assistance to American farmers. $12 billion is a lot of money, Merrill. What do you think? Peanuts for you, though, right?

Peanuts. She's a farmer of rice. Comedy gold, President Trump. Comedy gold. Yes, that's Trump tossing out peanut jokes at a rice grower on Monday. He unveiled a $12 billion bailout for farmers who are facing higher costs and fewer buyers during the current trade war with China. I wonder how that trade war started. And where does Trump say he'll find $12 billion? Why from tariff revenue, of course? The policy that hurt farmers is now supposed to rescue them? Absolutely, because it makes Trump a farming hero. This is a signature magic trick he's pulled before.

During Trump's first term, he sent farmers more than $22 billion in aid during a trade war with China, and he's sent more in 2020. Those bailouts were not funded by tariff revenue, but you can see the pattern here, right? According to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, farmers should see the new aid by the end of February. And who could have predicted that Trump, our master salesman to China, could fail us with pictures like this? As I told this to President Xi, our soybeans are more... nutritious than competitors. Somebody said, is that a Trump statement or is that real?

In fact, you know who asked me that question? President Xi asked me that question. President Xi, I was not aware of your game. And that's the news. Before we go, strict scrutiny is back this week with a wild episode, Trump's maritime murders. Kate, Melissa, and Leah bring on Professor Rebecca Ingber to break down the blatant illegality behind the administration's killing of alleged narco-terrorists off the coast of South America. They also unpack a busy week of oral arguments, from cases on crisis pregnancy centers to asylum claims,

to whether your internet provider can get busted for what you download. Listen to strict scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Don't swallow Faberjeet eggs and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about a man in Auckland, New Zealand who walked into a jewelry store, grabbed a Faberjay egg locket valued it around $20,000 and swallowed it.

Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and good news! The authorities got the egg back. Bad news. They got it back in exactly the way you think. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Four and Chris Alport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case.

We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Ali, and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adrian Hill. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. I'm going to be. Thank you.